Federal Panel [not NIST] Rejects Paper Trail For E-Voting 191
emil10001 writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has rejected a proposal suggesting that electronic voting have a paper trail. The draft recommendation was developed by NIST scientists, who called out electronic voting machines as being 'impossible' to secure." From the article: "Committee member Brit Williams, who opposed the measure, said, 'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.' The proposal failed to obtain the 8 of 15 votes needed to pass. Five states — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina — use machines without a paper record exclusively. Eleven states and the District either use them in some jurisdictions or allow voters to chose whether to use them or some other voting system." So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
Update: 12/11 03:20 GMT by KD : Correction: It was not NIST that rejected NIST's recommendations, it was a federal panel chartered by Congress, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.
Update: 12/11 03:20 GMT by KD : Correction: It was not NIST that rejected NIST's recommendations, it was a federal panel chartered by Congress, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.
First p (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:First p (Score:5, Funny)
Parent is insightful (or at least funny). (Score:3, Informative)
This is one of those situations where knee-jerk moderating doesn't quite work.
In short... Yes .. and ... no (Score:2)
Then There's the Conspiracy Theory (Score:2)
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But you and the GP seem to fit Occam's Razor better, so I think it's likely to be true. Sadly.
-nB
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Are you saying that they're waiting for something REALLY important to come along before they unleash the their cheats?
I do think we need better accountability in elections, because it's terrible that we can't be certain in the country
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realistically though if you were to cheat you would want it to me hard to detect, maybe if they did the algorithm just needs more tweaking?
I dunno, I simply hope for the big backlash to put indys in office. I bet if Ross Perot ran now he'd take it by a landslide.
-nB
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Or, if you are a republican:
Well, it is obvious that the dirty dems riged the vote this time around! They stole the election! And we all know that the dems ALWAYS rig elections (*point back to past casses of votter coersion*).
heh, pardon me, just felt like it
As for why I think they voted it down?
They don't r
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Democrats use dead votes to win.
We still all lose.
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Only in Chicago. And you dont ask questions. Daley is the kingXXXX mayor, just deal with it.
Cheers.
Re:In short... Yes .. and ... no (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, if each American who reads slashdot went out and smashed just ONE voting machine each with a sledgehammer, this entire argument would be a moot point.
I do think we need better accountability in elections, because it's terrible that we can't be certain in the country that's supposed to be the leader in democracy.
Is this a joke? America has replaced more democratic leaders with puppet dictators than Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia put together, and their own democracy looks more and more like a trick of the light with each passing day.
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'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.'
This illustrates the problem with these people. They view the paperless machines as voting machines that need to be reinstalled. They are not voting machines at all. The recommendation is talking about the original installation of voting system hardware where none currently exist.
This is like saying you shouldn't buy a new computer because you'd basically be reinstalling your television.
You know, if e
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I am not saying that they did that, I am saying that just because they won it doesn't mean they didn't cheat. It could mean they didn't cheat enough and maybe next time they will.
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Yes... (Score:2)
Paper ballots == ballot stuffing.
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1) The paper record is a roll that records votes sequentially. This can potentially compromise the secrecy of the ballot.
2) The printer itself malfunctions -- the paper jams, ink runs out, paper runs out, paper is damaged or destroyed while advancing, etc. This would be especially problematic in jurisdictions where the paper trail is the ballot of record -- i.e. any disputes or recounts have to be based on the paper rather than the electron
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Manual recount doesn't mean that you don't use machines. And ballot printers do print barcodes.
As far as the butterfly ballot issue goes -- this is a $0.10 problem with a $0.10 solution. Design ballots that aren't confusing. Go for optical scan machines rather than punch-card machines (which have been know to be problematic for decades). Substituting a DRE machine in this case is a $3,000 solution to a $0.10 problem.
Paper can be mangled out of sight of the voter. You may not buy it, but it's happened, m
And yet... (Score:2)
Really, before we worry about whether we've recorded the vote correctly, shouldn't we be worrying about if we recorded the voter correctly?
details [washingtonpost.com]
Great quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Um
Stupidest. Excuse. For. Shilling. For. The. Forces. Of. Evil. EVER.
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Wasted money going electronic (Score:3, Insightful)
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This is absolutey not true. Electronic voting done right works in many places, most notably Brazil. Theyve had some scandals but now they have paper verified voting. You vote and it prints out a slip of paper. The paper goes in a bag in case of contestment. (is that a word?) Not to mention Brazil is HUGE country. Its almost 200 million. We're at 300 million and we dont
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The problem here is the cronyism. You cant make voting machines in the for-profit/old boys club. These machines (or least their designs) need to be first developed by the government, tested by the government, open to the people, then sent to manufacturers. The top down approach of business approaching government with a machine designed in-house is terrible for this kind of application.
Oh! I get it now! It's a trickle-down democracy!
By giving vote-breaks to the richest 1%, their increased democratic empowerment will trickle-down to benefit the disenfranchised!
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Unfortunately, this is not an apt comparison. Electronic voting does indeed scale well. But as far as elections are concerned, the US is not a country of 300 million -- it is 50 different states each of which has its own laws and practices regarding the conduct of elections, and each of which is made up of
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If not, it's just as useless as no paper trail at all.
Example from the ACM:
Voting systems should also enable each voter to inspect a physical (e.g., paper) record to verify that his or her vote has been accurately cast and to serve as an independent check on the result produced and stored by the system.
http://www.acm.org/usacm/Issues/EVoting.htm [acm.org]
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Yep, all bad excuses.
We're spending 1.6 billion a week [iraqanalysis.org] on a war that will purportedly make us safer. (Irrelevant for our argument here whether it does or not.) But we won't spend several billion to ensure that one of the cornerstones of our democratic system of government, the voting process, is reasonably secure and verifiable?
Wonderful. Just peachy.
It shouldn't only be about cost. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no idea who I voted for in any election. I know who I thought I voted for, but I have no idea if it was counted that way. Where can I go to find that out? Let's say there is some way for me to determine if my vote was counted in a certain way. What about everyone else? Is there a way to make sure the vote they think was mine was exclusively mine?
I'd rather have the problems associated with receipts with ids on them that I can log online to see who I voted for instead of the current system.
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So what if there's a paper trail? It means absolutely nothing unless it's actually used, and is accessible by the people casting the votes! This is something that is wrong with the current system also!
I have no idea who I voted for in any election. I know who I thought I voted for, but I have no idea if it was counted that way. Where can I go to find that out? Let's say there is some way for me to determine if my vote was counted in a certain way. What about everyone else? Is there a way to make sure the vote they think was mine was exclusively mine?
I'd rather have the problems associated with receipts with ids on them that I can log online to see who I voted for instead of the current system.
That would alloc coercion and vote buying.
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You gotta be kidding me if you think they aren't already buying votes.
Let them attempt to buy elections, make it illegal, put out "honeypots", catch the rats and disqualify them from the race! Even if they could directly buy votes, think of how much money you'd need to spend just to sway an election... and there's no way you could do that without getting caught.
I sure hope so
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See this post [slashdot.org] for my solution..
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It's a paper-based voting system that allows you to verify that your vote was cast but doesn't allow you to prove how you voted.
In general terms you vote twice for guy you want, and once for the guy you don't want, leaving your guy +1 over the other. You then are allowed to take a copy (at random) of one the three ballots to walk out with. It has a serial number that is no way related to the other ballots. You use the serial number to check that at least 1/3
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If you have a paper trail, that's
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Sure, the website will list all of the 'votes', and they will match with the tally. However, you don't know that *any* of those votes are valid. At most, you can only verify one, and that is your own. In order to double-check that any vote is correct, you would have to have someone say "Yup, that's who I voted for". And then, in order to count the whole election, you would have to have everyone confirm their vote to you.
If
re: privacy (Score:2)
i still don't see the problem with simple scantron "fill in the bubble" voting sheets. fill them in, take them to a machine and feed it in. the machine displays the votes on screen that it is about to record. you confirm that "yup, the machine rea
Why don't you understand vote fraud? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fine. In the next election, make sure you vote for the party I tell you to. I expect to see your reciept as proof you voted appropriately. If you don't, I'll break your kneecaps with a sledgehammer. And if I can't find you, I'll just have your family killed.
Or we could just, you know, *not* promote vote fraud. That would be OK too. Whichever you and
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It is used. Whenever there's a recount.
No, you can't link an individual ballot to a particular individual. That's a feature, not a bug. If you could identify individuals you would enable coercion before the election and reprisals afterwards, hardly favourable conditions for a democratic society.
But while you can't follow your particular ballot through the system, you can do that as a group. If 100 people vote at your polling station and more or less than 100 votes are tallied then there has been some ta
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No mechanisms for figuring out how many ids are associated with an account... no mechanism for verifying that someone gave you the id that was actually used in the final counts.
...and no mechanism for verifying that the vote you entered was counted correctly, which is what started this discussion. A paper trail is critical, regardless.
yp
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If it's not, they should be able to pull up a scanned image of their ballot printout, which they reviewed after it printed from the voting machine and before it was dropped into the box.
Granted, it might be difficult to prove that your vote was tampered with if it has been, but
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I'd prefer a published file that had all the ballots in voter-readable form.
Imagine a website that you could go to (either at the polls, or at home after the election) where you could key in your super-secret code and verify your vote. Imagine a series of PDF's auto-generated (or even more compact and readable than that). Imagine being able to pull up every ballot in your precinct, and being able to verify the ballots against the precinct totals to see how yo
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Until your union manager wants your "super-secret code" to make sure you're "part of the family". It doesn't seem right, but you have a stable paycheck and kids to feed. Someone else can rock the boat...
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"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." - Mark Twain
So, the next question is, are the willfully ignorant worse than those who have tired of dealing with them?
Or, to put it another way. Voting, and the pitfalls inherent in it is a very old topic with lots of information available, and examples to show the pitfalls in practice. Perha
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Perhaps you should read up on the topic, rather than regurgitating one bad idea or another
It's worse than that: it's a bunch of people pulling out the same bad idea and then getting all huffy when you tell them to go read a book. It's like the Creationists all over again.
Too Costly? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, disregarding the fact that their own scientists cited the machine's insecurities, the executives feel that the 'cost' of replacing or updating the machines is prohibitive for our countries (arguably) most important decision?
This whole things reeks of pork and the 'old boys' club'
Things have changed in two days (Score:5, Informative)
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The committee essentially reversed itself the next day. The second proposal was worded differently, making it clear that only future e-voting machines would be required to have independent audit mechanisms. The second version also addressed some concerns about accessibility of disabled people to the paper trail mechanisms.
So, in short, the story posted on sl
Bad math or uncounted votes? (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you deadlock 6 to 6 on a 15 person committee? Were the other 3 votes just not counted?
Re:Bad math or uncounted votes? (Score:5, Funny)
Story is out of date! (Score:5, Informative)
http://news.com.com/Panel+changes+course%2C+appro
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1095 [freedom-to-tinker.com]
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That's interesting, I submitted the story yesterday at noon, and hadn't seen anything new on it. But reading the update is also quite interesting, because the issue remains that the voting machines which are currently in place, and have no paper trail, will stay there as they are. The proposal that passed leaves it to the "next generation" of machines, and does not seem to affect the ones currently in place. So, this story is still relevant, because those problematic machines are still in place, and will st
Come Again? (Score:2)
So who's got the real story and who's just spreading FUD? Inquiring minds want to know.
Not cost (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Accountability in voting will be a joke because that would be an inconvenience to the Inner Party achieving their goals, whatever those may be. Cost is simply an excuse for the public.
No price is too high for securing Democracy! (Score:2, Insightful)
Think about it, we spend more in Iraq each month than this proposal would cost, all in the name of "securing democracy". Not only that, it's perfectly clear at this point that the only "freedom" we are providing the Iraqis is the freedom to kill each other and our soldiers.
How the hell can anyone not support this measure? Or, more appropriately, how are the clowns who don't support it keeping their jobs?
Oh,
yeah,
the easily stealable elections...
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Well, in Maryland, the clowns are leading members of the Democratic party, who never make mistakes and have jobs for life. They approved the purchase of the flawed Diebold machines, and because they are infallible, there is nothing wrong with the machines.
Really Tired of this Crap! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Easy enough to fix. Hang a sample ballot in each voting machine with a sign: "If your ballot does not look exactly like *this*, please ask for a new one.
Even if you fix the reliability issues, the machine doing the counting is just as open to hacking as any other.
The machines need not be complex or even computerized. They could be as simple as 20 Veeder-Roo
Conspiracy (Score:2, Insightful)
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HAHAHAHA. Ain't it great, I said "vote for stupidity"! It can mean "Vote" as a clever tie-in to the story subject, or "vote for stupidity" as in "I vote for stupid things", e.g. Bush, or it could be just my answer to the parent post or it
-5 Inane Blathering. Karma whore no more.
Open Voting (Score:2)
Now, while I'm a fan of open source, I can definitel
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Voter ---> Computer --> PRINTOUT --> BOX --> Counting --> Final Tally
I could care less if the computer is rigged as long as the printout say what I actually thought I voted for and as long as I can observe the counting.
Secure tallying (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever scheme we dream up, such as punch-card voting, or a paper trail, the fact remains that we really don't know whether our vote will affect the *tally*. A paper trail only comes into play when the official tally is suspect for some reason. What we really need to know is that our vote is counted. Even if we have a bar-code on a paper receipt that shows exactly who we voted for, we have no way of knowing whether or not our little bar-code verified data gets in to the official tally.
Here's what I wrote [slashdot.org] the last time this discussion came up on slashdot:
"What I'm envisioning is some kind of method where votes can be tallied, and the running tally can be periodically published during the count. I imagine it would have some kind of hashing technology, like PGP, where tallies are perhaps encoded in a string, and the string is published. The hashing token, or whatever mechanism allowed a vote to be legitimately added to the tally, would be passed from one voter to another, after they voted. This puts the power to count votes into the hand of the voters, rather than a poorly-trained election volunteer, a partisan, or a hackable machine. Because of the constraints of the token and hashing, a voter can only vote as they are allowed, without destroying the tally hash string."
One problem with secure tallying is that you want to make sure that your vote is counted in the official tally, but you don't want others to deduce how you voted from the official tally. At this point, I imagine one voter passing the official tally to the next voter. That way you can be certain you have affected the tally, and the design of the system constrains you to only one vote. Periodically, perhaps every hour, the official tally is publicly released. Nobody can then figure out how you voted; they only know how the crowd voted in the past hour.
To satisfy the choke point of one voter passing the official tally to the next person, there can be multiple official tallies that are running concurrently, and at the end of voting, they are all added together in a master tally.
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Google didn't turn up any hits for the unquoted phrase "Chaum's peel-off ballot". Where can I learn more about it?
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Perhaps if your pool is that small, you don't need to report hourly. If you have 10 people voting in an hour, just report at the end of voting. However, if you have 300 people voting every hour, report every hour.
Perhaps the trigger to publish the running tally is the number of people voting, instead of arbitrary time blocks.
Wasn't E-voting the promised land? (Score:2)
Now you're complaining about other countries taxing energy use to reduce global warming and u.s. lagging behind in such taxes. Wonder where this is going.
Stalin was right... (Score:2)
If voting mattered, they wouldn't let you vote! Silly to think you actually have choices in an election. Elections are just your high school SGA with older people. Simple popularity contests.
So ... accountability in voting (Score:3, Insightful)
So ... accountability in voting will be a joke for the foreseeable future because it costs too much?
And accountability in voting will be a joke because the first implementation was a total fuck up?
In software, the solution to this problem would be: eVoting 2.0
Changelog:
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OSS voting in 1 day (Score:2)
1. Setup linux distro with apache, tomcat, whatever
2. Install ballot web app
3. Install ballot CUPS printer filter
4. Setup firefox for kiosk mode
Counting machine:
1. Setup linux distro with ballot_counter.py
2. Attach scanner
3. Run ballots through OCR software
4. Update counters (in realtime as scanned)
Ballots print like this, one measure per line:
PRESIDENT: AL GORE
SENATE: JAMES WEBB
STEM-CE
An illustration of how stupid this situation is (Score:2)
I do not understand why an
What's the point of e-voting? (Score:2)
-b.
how the paper trail should work... (Score:2)
When the user presses the vote button the machine prints a ticket with the results.
The ticket is a two part ticket just like the recepits you get at the store.
The top copy goes into a lock box, the bottom copy is handed to the voter.
Before handing in the ticket the voter examines the ticket to make sure it is correct.
If in error the operator can cancel the vote on the machine and the voter makes corrections.
If correct the operator finalizes t
You damn betcha it costs too much! (Score:2)
Umm, these are computers right? (Score:2)
What am I missing?
There are simple cheap methods (Score:2)
My Mailclad scheme uses simple random numbers and data bases to make an unbreakable system that allow for clear open auditing while still allowing voters anonymity.
It's similar to the Autotote system used for betting on horse races and the way some Vegas slot machines print out cash vouchers, also Lotto tickets use a similar random serial number scheme.
Heck even Mc Donald's Monopoly game pieces uses random serial numbers to ensure anti forgery to prevent cheaters.
I have started a s
Why would anyone oppose verifiability? (Score:2)
An election system is verifiable if the results of the election can be verified by counting the unalterable voter-verified records of the votes that were cast in that election.
There is only one reason why any official might oppose requiring all elections systems to be verifiable. That reason is: That official wants to rig future elections.
Those officials should be tried for treason and shot.
Is NIST more independent than other agencies? (Score:2)
YOUR VOTE Isn't worth the $ to ensure it's counted (Score:2)
Hasn't Anyone Noticed... (Score:2)
Except that Hand Counting is Cheaper! (Score:2)
We can pressure Congress (Score:2)
http://www.democracyforamerica.com/paperballots [democracyforamerica.com]
NIST committee just flunked the sixth grade (Score:2)
As an IT person and as an election judge here in Texas here are my comments. I omit those of despair
PARALLEL LOGIC. Voting electronics are PC embedded based (the ones I have seen boot up). Votes are precious. Lets assume the operations part of voting goes wacko clear down to the chip level. So create electronics based on outer space electronics. Copy each vote (time stamp and who voted for) to
Mail voting problems (Score:2)
Problem with mail voting is that ballots could be made to "disappear" outside the election system (for example post office clerks could be bribed to toss them). The more hands sensitive data passes through, the more of a chance there is for corruption of said data, whether accidental or malevolent.
-b.
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Big deal. Election fraud is also a felony (though not necessarily a Federal one) in most places. Jail is jail - if anything, state prison time is "harder" than Federal prison since state prisons are often old facilities with poor oversight and underpaid pissed-off guards.
-b.
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Your vote does not even get counted in many (most?) jurisdictions unless the vote is very close or the losing candidate demands it. And it may not get counted for lots of other reasons even if it is a close race where your vote might have been very important.
Mailed ballots have been thrown out, uncounted, by court order in many cases for various reasons. Even before the mailed-in ballot can get past those obstacles there is the very real possibility that it will be intentionally '
Look at Oregon for how to make it work (Score:2)
You should spend some time here [state.or.us] reading about Oregon's exlusive vote-by-mail (VBM) policy. In particular, there is an excellent and balanced analysis [state.or.us] (PDF!) by Jimmy Carter and James Baker III -- you may have heard of these guys. From the report:
The report c