The State of Electronic Voting In the 2008 US Elections 223
Geek Satire writes "Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately. The 2008 US elections have avoided many well-known problems of the 2004 and 2000 elections, but many problems remain. O'Reilly News interviewed Dr. Barbara Simons, advisor to the Federal Election Assistance Commission, to review electronic voting in the 2008 US elections, discussing the physical security of storing and maintaining election machines, the move from electronic back to paper ballots, and why open source voting machines don't necessarily solve problems of bugs, backdoors, and audits."
Re:Voting is a joke now (Score:3, Informative)
But if you look at the Popular vote it was 53% Obama vs 46% McCain. While that is a large gap, it's certainly not large enough to say McCain could never have won.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/president/
Re:Is it that hard? (Score:1, Informative)
Speaking as a database guy, it is only a medium-to-hard problem to design an electronic voting system that is secure and reliable. What I am seeing, however, is lots of evidence that the people who are currently implementing automated voting systems aren't good enough to do the job, although they may have been forced to do their job badly by Dilbertian managers. The type of problems I have been reading about on Bradblog and other sites speaks volumes about the incompetence of the execution in this area. For example, a voting system that requires "calibration" by unskilled workers in the field is automatically suspect on security grounds, the machines ought to be certified, tested and then sealed tight until they are used on election day.
Re:Paper??? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and they have over 10x the population we do, electronic voting certainly tallies properly.
I've heard that argument before, and I don't think it holds. As the grandparent said, paper voting should scale, cause you have more ballot places for a larger population.
Case in point: Take Germany. They use paper ballots with a circle and an X, just the GP describes. It works fine and you have the results with the same speed as you get them in the US. Faster, if you compare it to 2000. A recount would be much faster, cause they are easy to read.
If they can do it for 50 million voters, then I don't see why it won't also work for 100 million voters in the US.
Re:unpopular opinion (Score:1, Informative)
The problem with electronic voting is this: Voting needs to be anonymous, otherwise you have people being coerced into selling their vote (aka "vote the way we say and bring us the receipt or you're fired"). But if it is anonymous, how can you be sure your vote was counted correctly? The computer can display the person you voted for, while recording a vote for somebody else. You can't give them a receipt or any way for them to verify their vote that they can take with them, because then it isn't anonymous anymore. The only way to make an electronic voting system work in a way that the voter can prove that their vote is registered properly is to print a piece of paper and have that piece of paper be considered the actual vote, while the computer is used for a "fast count" only. The voter can then verify that the correct data is on the receipt (except for blind people, unless you make a braille printer and have somebody counting who can read braille).
Re:Help America Vote? (Score:5, Informative)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_past_the_post#Effect_on_political_parties [wikipedia.org]
Re:Help America Vote? (Score:3, Informative)
IRV is used in Australia. Australia has a two-party* system. So clearly that isn't a ailver bullet.
*OK, one party is a fixed coalition of two parties - but that coalition is defined before the elections, and never changes, so really it's two wings of a party.
Scantegrity (Score:4, Informative)
Scantegrity.org [scantegrity.org]