Voting Drops 83 Percent In All-Digital Election 156
For the first time ever, Oahu residents had to use their phones or computers to vote with some surprising results. 7,300 people voted this year, compared to 44,000 people the previous year, a drop of about 83 percent. "It is disappointing, compared to two years ago. This is the first time there is no paper ballot to speak of. So again, this is a huge change and I know that, and given the budget, this is a best that we could do," said Joan Manke of the city Neighborhood Commission. She added that voters obviously did not know about or did not embrace the changes.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
Why bother when you know its hacked? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect the feeling is that any election taking place over the net or the phone system is so easily hackable as to become laughable.
There is no changeable paper trail for this, contrary to the trend nationally to require same.
How long till botnets on the island (or elsewhere) start selling election stealing services?
Ok, now expect the defenders telling us this is all impossible and calling me a Luddite in 3, 2, 1...
Who cooked up this scheme? (Score:3, Insightful)
The city cut its expenses in half by using computers and phone technology by Everyone Counts.
"This is the future for presidential elections, general elections, primary elections, all the way," Everyone Counts consultant Bob Watada said.
Watada is the former Campaign Spending Commission director.
Whoa! Conflict of interest much?
1) Con city into using Company A
2) Sign fat contract with Company A
3) Hold election (sweep massive FAIL under rug)
4) Profit
Re:7300 votes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
The advantage voting machines and paper ballots have isn't that they can't be rigged, it's that they are easier to audit. Auditing an electronic vote requires that the audit trail was built in in the first place, and that the auditors are tech people of skill equal to or greater than the people who created the system in the first place.
Auditing a paper ballot can be done by anyone who managed to pass math through middle school. (Assuming the ballot wasn't designed by idiots. And even then it only takes a little more skill to decide how to handle edge cases.)
Engagement (Score:5, Insightful)
look, morons: (Score:5, Insightful)
paper voting: cheap
electronic voting: expensive
paper voting: 10x attack vectors to corrupt it
electronic voting: 1,000x attack vectors to corrupt it
the richest, most advanced, technophilic nation and the poorest most backwards nation should all vote the same way: paper ballot
anything else is simply paying more $ just for more ways to corrupt the vote. a democracy is based on legitimacy of the vote. if you cast doubt on that legitimacy, if there is any taint in the process of voting, and electronic voting allows for myriad more ways to do just that, then you destroy people's faith in their own government
this is not a joke, please stop with the electronic voting. its downright dangerous as it threatens the legitimacy of elected officials in the eyes of the people due to its black box nature: votes go in, leader comes out, who the fuck knows what kind of sausage is in the middle
yes, you can still fuck around with stacks of paper with checkmarks on them and mess with the vote thataways. but in a lot less ways, and a lot less opaquely, and you need a lot of cooperation and hard work. one well-placed hacker can change millions of votes in untraceable ways in milliseconds with electronic voting
in the case of close elections, you have ballots to fall back on that many human eyes can see and hold in their hands and tally for themselves. what do you have with electronic voting? a bunch of bits of doubtful provenance on a hard disk and some easily corruptible bureaucrat saying "trust me". fuck that. i'd rather a close vote take 3 months to tally on paper than a 3 second tally of votes of a black box nature
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
the vast majority of people (yes even old folk!) know how to fucking using a computer these days. it isnt 1988
But many otherwise very intelligent people find that they cannot understand them. Sometimes it's just that they have no confidence with computers or believe that they cannot use them. In other cases perhaps the need or the interest has never been there. Most people, even very intelligent people, have a 'blind spot' - a subject or activity they find difficult or even mind-numbingly overwhelming.
Eg. I can read and write in ancient Hebrew and Greek, was described as 'brilliant' while studying and am often asked for help in various areas due to my ability to just pick things up on the run and teach/explain/do whatever is required. When I started my own business however I ran into my nemesis. Accounting. It took me over a month to get my head around the basics. Longer still to start to understand my accounting software. Don't know if I'll ever get past the basics with it cos I seriously find it hard to understand.
So I don't give people who don't understand computers a hard time. Most people can send emails and write a text document. Surfing the web is also pretty common. Internet banking is a bonus. If that is all they need, that is all that most people will ever learn and that is ok. When they need something else, they ring me and pay me $60 an hour as a tech. I don't mind at all!
Intelligence has nothing to do with it... (Score:5, Insightful)
I (and you, apparently) am fortunate enough to have both phone and Internet access, but there are many citizens who don't. Homeless people have the right to vote, too, without having to seek out some technological proxy.
If this ever hits my area, I'll look forward to writing off my Internet access and computer costs when I do my taxes.
Finally, if you're "intelligent" enough to hang around
dont look at me (Score:3, Insightful)
look at any budget for any electronic voting system in the world
now compare it to the voting process budget for swaziland
the more secure paper ballot voting process for swaziland
too many people are embracing a less secure more expensive way to vote out of nothing more than technophilia, rather than a coherent understanding of the requirements for the voting system, and how paper satisfies those requirements better, more cheaply, more securely
OCR the shit if you want your results fast. but you better have that paper backup, and no, sorry, printout doesn't cut it security wise: paper first, THEN tallying
Re:look, morons: (Score:3, Insightful)
The for small, local elections it may not matter that much other than standardization.
The real problem is speedy results. People in the US think of elections as a some kind of a race. A race with a winner and a loser where the results are available at the end of the race. In the case where results aren't available immediately, the TV News people are going to make up results based on exit polls and other information. This was done when Gore was announced around midnight in 2000. Of course, these were not official results, but that didn't matter all that much to people because they went to bed.
Without speedy results, we are turning over the elections to the TV News folks.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
I did my master's work on e-voting in 1999, and followed it since.
You're right, but nailed only half of the issue (audit).
The other half is that we expect our elections to employ secret ballots. With paper, you can physically watch the ballots, even though you've dissociated voters from votes. The voter can see that the paper is marked as the voter intended, but not with anything that identifies the voter, and deposit it in a ballot box. The voter can further have confidence that, as you say, many interested parties who are unlikely to collude will then watch that ballot box carefully; and that the votes it contains will be counted. The press can witness the physical process of vote retrieval and counting.
But in all electronic systems, it seems impossible to provide both an audit trail and a secret ballot. Various schemes that attempt to deliver both properties one way or another require trust in a rather small set of entities whose actions are not very transparent to observers and who cannot necessarily be deemed "unlikely to collude". Those trusted parties have the power to control the outcome of the election, subvert the secret ballots, or both -- which effectively means that they, and not the voters, pick the winners of the election.