E-Voting Reform Bill Gaining Adherants 161
JeremyDuffy sends us to Ars Technica for a look at an e-voting bill making its way through Congress that is gaining the support of the likes of Ed Felten and the EFF. Quoting: "HR 811 features several requirements that will warm the hearts of geek activists. It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available."
How to refute the proprietary "rights" argument (Score:5, Insightful)
Luddites oppose robotic death machines! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's better to vote and not have it count than to.. er.. get help voting and have it count?
I really hope that line from the article was a flawed summary from the reporter. If it's an accurate characterization, Snider is missing the point entirely.
Opposition to electronic voting is not blanket opposition to use of electronics in voting procedures. It's opposition to secret devices that follow hidden procedures and proclaim an official result -- without the ability of anyone to verify the correctness of the procedures or the result.
A step in the right direction (Score:5, Insightful)
Platform software (Score:5, Insightful)
But if only the program is transparent and the rest of the code on the machine is not, what's to prevent (for example) Steve Jobs for running for president and including a line of code that tells the MacOS voting machines that he always wins at least 50.1% of the vote?
Re:There is no Excuse for laziness. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Congratulations, you just killed it (Score:3, Insightful)
Well then the bill is toothless, because the vendor could install 'backdoor' patches into the os and nobody would be the wiser.
A voting machine vendor can just al easily load a version of linux with wine (though maybe clunky) to run their voting machine app. The difference they save on MS licenses can be used for a programmer to do the necessary program.
Really, there is no reason at all to not have any part of not be open source. Of course, congress whores itself out to lobbyists, so who knows.
Re:Congratulations, you just killed it (Score:1, Insightful)
voting machines waste of money (Score:4, Insightful)
KISS anyone? No, because then there are no kickbacks and bribes to take.
(lol verify word is "paranoia")
Re:Congratulations, you just killed it (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps they reduced its support slightly, but no more than a very tiny bit. What good would the source do to anyone? Remember that there is nothing stopping the vendor from copyrighting the source code and adding a provision to the license which says that no one may make derivative works: all the vendor must do is make the code publicly available.
So a competitor can't really gain anything from the code--it can't be overly complicated (this is a voting machine) and even if they do, the moment they release their machine onto the market, their source must be published, and certainly a competing vendor would notice such striking similarities in code.
Of course, who knows, Diebold might sue Congress for a law which they were not expecting..... :-)
Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good, but so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
What good is a viable candidate if your vote doesn't count anyway? Accurate voting is an essential element of a democracy, and so it MUST be in place.
If you want a better system, you need to support each component of that better system when it comes along. Sticking your head in the sand and waiting for everything to completely match your dream world isn't going to get you anywhere.
Re:Congratulations: they made the right choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't agree more, because the two together comprise a functioning embedded system. Auditing the application and ignoring the operating system is pointless, from a secure voting perspective. The Congressman has it right.
Besides, this is not a supercomputer. This is not an accounting system. This is a goddamn electromechanical counter, a mindless device which could be implemented with vacuum tubes, or discrete TTL, or a BASIC Stamp! There doesn't need to be an "operating system", unless you need it to throw up your colorful corporate logo or justify your "Microsoft Vista ready" sticker. I mean, we aren't talking some incredibly complex technological requirements here, although there are those with a vested interest in making it appear so. For crying out loud it's been done for centuries using pieces of paper. Any corporation that manufactures these things that makes "intellectual property" claims about its "advanced software" is FULL OF CRAP and trying to keep the public from knowing what a shoddy job it did, or worse. If you aren't willing to open up your voting system to public inspection from the chips on up, then you shouldn't be allowed to sell them to our government. Any of our governments.
More to the point, this is just the kind of system that should be only as complex as it needs to be
Fine by me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or printer and software upgrades.
If Diebold fixes the auditability problem I have no further gripe with the use of their machines. If buying an upgrade from them is 'way cheaper than replacing the machines outright, that's just dandy.
"If it's worth doing, it's worth doing at a profit."
Try a hard question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because not all paper ballots are created equal, and paper ballots filled out by humans are more prone to error than paper ballots printed by a machine.
The current paper ballots involve things like hole-punches (hanging chads anyone?), filling in bubbles (fill in too many or too few or only partially), butterfly ballots, etc.
It's the same reason your college professors wanted you to type your papers. The machine, by default, makes the paper much more legible than it would be if the paper were written by hand.
Same with electronic voting. The machine makes the ballot much less likely to have an error on it than if the ballot is done by a human with a pen (optical ballots) or punch (punch cards).
There are other features you get with electronic voting. For example, you don't need to print the ballots in advance. You can just load the ballot into the machine the morning of the election, and when people votes, the machine prints out the office and the selected candidate. So instead of having to 'lock' the ballot a month in advance to allow for the ballots to be printed, you might be able to reduce that lead time to a few days or a week. Then when a candidate dies three weeks before the election, or somebody wins/loses a lawsuit, you have more time to correct the ballot.
You can also do neat things like randomize the order candidates appear on the ballot. One problem with elections is the candidate listed first tends to get more votes than other candidates. With electronic ballots, candidates can all be listed first an 'equal' number of times.
Electronic voting also gives you the ability to accommodate more people with disabilities.
Re:Good law! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's time for mark-sense ballots everywhere? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only is it machine-readable, but the ballots can be hand-counted quite easily in case of close elections.
Re:Who cares about OS e-voting software anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
But on the whole, I actually agree mostly with the top level poster in that pencil and paper are perfectly adequate to the task of recording elections. I just listed the only advantages I can think of with electronic voting booths over paper and pencil. Otherwise, electronic solutions are trouble-prone, controversial, and will always be suspect. Speed of reporting results to the news media is not guaranteed by the Constitution -- that's why it provides for two months to elapse between the election and the candidate taking office. Last minute candidate changes are similarly not guaranteed -- the secretaries of state are responsible for distributing ballots, and are typically given a month or more by statute in which to do it. The old system is not broken, and does not require electronics to fix.
Re:Good, but so what? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are problems with our representative democracies, but effectively going back to a direct democracy won't solve anything. Representative democracy is a direct cause of the division of labour which is the main reason our civilization is as advanced as it is. Instead of everyone farming their own food, building their own tools, writing their own programs, performing their own surgery, being their own lawyers and making their own political decisions, we divide the labour. I farm, you code, Johnny performs surgery and Karen sues people and everyone is happy doing what they're best at.
The important thing to remember about representatives is not that they should vote AS their constituents, but that they should make INFORMED DECISIONS in the interest of their contituents. That's the labour we divide to our representatives, to inform themselves of what a political decision means or leads to in the future, to inform themselves of the political landscape and the compromises needed to get a certain policy accepted, to see the big picture, to enact long-term policies for the benefit of their constituents, even though it might be bad in the short term. And, most importantly, to take personal responsibility for the votes cast as an elected official.
You forget some things about political decisions that would get totally lost in your suggested system.
1) Most decisions are incredibly boring regarding concerns that are interesting only to a small minority of the population. With direct democracy, everyone would have to spend time informing themselves of the impact of the fishing quotas of the North Atlantic to make the best decision. But seriously, people won't, they'll just press a little vote button on your webpage and not care what was enacted as a result. Ooops, we bankrupted an entire industry, oh well, noone *I* knew...
2) There's a lot of decisions like the one above, with direct democracy, so everyone would have to check your webpage every day, vote on the issues in a sensible manner, taking time away from whatever else they were doing. Why should people do this every day for the rest of their lives? If everyone does not participate every day, then it's no longer the will of the people, but the will of the people who can be bothered to do this every day, or have time to do this every day. Your average working parent who make up the bulk of the taxpayers will not have time for this, making the "decisions" pretty skewed.
3) Everyone does not have access to the internet every day. Seriously, get some perspectives.
4) You may think that the representatives are biased or lobbied into submission or corrupt, but why would ordinary people be any better? If people believe in ads, what's to stop them from believing in every political ad on their TV, comfortably telling them what to vote for tomorrow?
5) Voter turnout here is about 80%. That means that 20% of the eligible population can't be bothered to make ONE decision every FOURTH YEAR. That's not a lot of work. And you want these people to make decisions every day or at least every week? About things they care even less for than high-level general political ideology?
6) Referendums always lack personal responsibility. "It is the will of the people" is a great way to not have to stand for your actions. Part of the job of being an elected official is to make decisions and take personal responsibility for them. If an official makes decisions that the constituents really dislike, he/she will be voted out of office and someone who makes decisions that are better in line with the voters will take his/her place. But if everyone is voting on every issue, who is responsible for the bad ones? What's stopping people from only making badly-informed, short-sighted decisions that benefit themselves financially in the short run, but are devastating to the country in the long run? You can't vote the voters out of office. You could never have a regime-change in your system, with all the benefits that follow those.