Deathblow To a Voting Machine 140
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."
Radiation? (Score:5, Funny)
Observer: "Looks like somebody voted for Dammechien Peteersrotmensenpoepjespiestnaaktgeborenzeldenthu
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I know you're kidding, but they are referring to electromagnetic radiation, which can be monitored with Van Eck phreaking [wikipedia.org].
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The old Nedap voting machines use obsolete hardware, and those machines are often not stored in a secure way (so they could be tampered with).
The new machines run Windows and a wireless modem. That doesn't sound like a safe combination to me.
As far as I'm concerned, a voting machine should at least make an immediate print-out of each vote (a good old-fashioned line printer would do), so that a recount can be done to check the machine's results.
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I seriously doubt that the high school cafeteria where I vote has been secured against spy cams and x-ray glasses. Electromagnetic-click-sniffing is the least of my concerns when my nosey neighbor is showing me to the voting station or handing me a "I Voted" sticker.
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I sometimes miss the rough Dutch humour...
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Well, not much of a phrase
(but consists of actual family names like naaktgebored (borne naked) and zeldenthus (seldom at home) )
Not the first time (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, pencil and paper voting was rejected. Of the 5 prototype pencils tested, 4 contained lead and the one lead-free pencil was determined to lose it sharpness after several votes.
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In fits and starts but it will proceeed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In fits and starts but it will proceeed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except there's a big difference between forging paper ballots, or having people vote multiple times under different identities, and using a computer-based system which could be altered easily enough to not record votes at all, record the incorrect votes, or have its count altered by an outside agent. Even the idea of a paper trail is somewhat laughable, as you're expecting people to hang on to this piece of paper for a significant time, on the off chance it might be needed to verify how they voted.
Computer-based voting is a long way from being a reliable enough method to be used exclusively. I think for now there should be a concentration on creating ballots that are easily machine-readible, making the counting easier. Purely computer-driven systems will have to be phased in in small numbers, so they can be monitored and bugs ironed out. Perhaps give people a choice of what type of machine they wish to use. You're going to have to do a lot of work to convince me that this technology is robust enough and secure enough to be used exclusively.
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The methods of fraud might be different, but the real question is what is the impact on the election(s) overall? Which method produces a more accurate count? When electronic voting proves more reliable it should be adopted as such.
The banking system is based on computers (and thedre aren't many examples of exploiting the system --sure there is oversight by the account-bearer but the point is the errors are small overall). The major kinks in the electronic banking system have been worked out; they shal
Re:In fits and starts but it will proceeed... (Score:5, Interesting)
So don't let you take the right to watch the counting!
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The banking system is not anonymous. If the bank takes money from someone, that someone can easily and quickly find out that it happened. If someone takes your vote, you have no way of knowing. It may really hit home if you live in a swing state. We know there was voter fraud with these electronic systems, so it really could have been *your vote* that was intentionally miscounted - if you live in one of those places. If we switch to a non-anonymous system, where
Re:In fits and starts but it will proceeed... (Score:5, Informative)
Instead, VVPT systems have a traditional physical lockbox. Think of the paper as being something behind glass; the user looks at it, validates that it says what they want it to say, and then press "yes" or "no". Press yes? It's deposited in a lockbox which can be secured via traditional methods. Press no? It's marked as void, or shredded, or whatever. It's not the voter's responsibility or burden to track the paper; rather, it's kept in the voting system for use in audits and recounts. (Audits being a very important thing -- having the ability to audit means you can take a sample of the physical ballots, check whether the proportions match what the electronic counters said, and know whether you have a big enough problem to require a larger recount).
This is still an improvement over pure paper ballots because you have the usability and accessibility enhancements associated with electronic voting, but the enhanced auditability associated with a piece of paper which a voter has looked at and approved.
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Think of the paper as being something behind glass; the user looks at it, validates that it says what they want it to say, and then press "yes" or "no". Press yes? It's deposited in a lockbox which can be secured via traditional methods.
And if someone can reprogram the machine to record votes a certain way, why can't they program it to dispense the correct paper audits as well? And a lock-box? Secure? You're right back to the same problem you have with paper ballots. Locks can be picked, boxes lost... so you end up with all the safeguards you have now plus those required to secure the computers and electronics from tampering. The only way you could be sure that the paper audit would work is the voter retained it, thereby confirming that
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Which is where laws come in that say the paper audits are done by hand and not machine. Most states have the laws written properly now where the paper audit takes precedence over the computed results.
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That's why they're behind glass where the voter can look at the paper before confirming his or her vote. If I told the machine I'm voting for Bob but the piece of paper behind the glass window says Alice, I (the voter) know there's something wrong.
Those problems aren't too bad;
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But it wouldn't say that. You would push Bob's button, and the paper would say Bob, but the electronic vote would go to Alice. The paper is only used in the case of a recount, so as long as the results are tweaked very slightly, not enough to trigger a recount,
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A recount, or an audit. Randomly select a jurisdiction and recount a statistically significant number of votes. Results vary from what the machine told you? Time for a full recount.
Statisticians are good at this kind of thing -- a 5% variance would be more than enough to get noticed. If you're going to create enough of a variance to make a significant difference in any but the closest of races, it's enough that a properly conducted audit will catch it.
This is e
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Yes, that's pretty good, if it's done right. However
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Right, because no one ever stuffed a ballot box.
Personally I'd like to see it done on the damned web, with mandatory voting.
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It's quite a bit harder to do that than it will be with e-voting.
I would *never* vote on the web.
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How so? Any idiot can stuff a ballot box, pay the right officials and it is done. With e-voting you have to not only corrupt the officials, but you need someone with the tech savy and know-how required to rig that particular type of machine.
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Further, there are effective countermeasures for ballot box stuffing. There are judges from both major parties at any pol
Voting has changed in history (Score:2)
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And I'll tell you why:
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I think the latter is more probable than the former, actually. Paying voters to choose one option over another will never work; threats are more effective as they invoke fear rather than a small reward.
There is never a reliable system (Score:2)
The USA military doesn't code our hi-tech weapons with Al Qaeda does it? (even back when we were allies) For voting, both "sides" of the political conflict can not be totally excluded nor can you be sure that they are.
BILLIONS of dollars are at stake and LIVES are at stake. This is proper motivation to exploit any system. No man-made and man-operated system can be completely foolproof (unless we find a way to remove the fool from the man.)
A
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Machines reading the ballots are the problem, not the solution. If there is any software involved in counting the votes, then our votes are counted by something that could be buggy or programmed maliciously/dishonestly. Why have computers count the vote at all? Speed? Do we need to know who won the next day, when they won't be sworn in for two months anyway? Reliability? A f
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Yeah, sure. And in the end, Microsoft Office will overcome the shortcomings and the missteps an
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You bring up something that doesn't get mentioned enough needs to always be optional. And someone must keep track of how many votes were cast electronically. If more than a small percentage insist on doint it the old fashioned way, that demonstrates low confidence in the electronic systems.
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I think there are plenty of people who object to computer-assisted voting, regardless of what you mean by the term. If you mean using a computer to create their ballot, lots of older people are not so comfortable with computers and would rather use a pen. If you mean having a computer count the ballots, I am one of many computer-s
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Having computers count ballots isn't really all that bad, in Tallahassee you fill out a bubblesheet then place it into a scanner, if the scanner isn't 100% sure how you voted, it spits it back out otherwise it counts and stores it. Incase of a recount the scan sheets are there. During the recount in 2000 we were the only county to have ZERO change in the final tally of the hand counted versus the machine co
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That's great that you had no changes. If computers are counting votes, and they're not correctly and randomly audited in every election against a piece of paper that the voter approved, it is "that bad". If that's the process where you are, then awesome. If not, then all it means is your election didn't happen to get hacked that time.
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However, in the context of voting, I would suggest that no digital system is secure enough for something as important as the vote.
You can put all the safeguards you want in place, but that can't stop one system admin with an agenda (or other 'insider' with access to the necessary tools), from exercising their own sort of 'veto power'.
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Of course they will eventually become the way to cast ones ballot; it's become obvious that certain interests want electronic voting systems and are going to implement them, no matter what.
"which of course are less than infallible"
Certainly, traditional voting methods are fallible, but tell me this: can you devise a paper based system wherein less than a dozen people need to be involved to tailor the result of a particular election to their wishes? That would be tr
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Voting computers, not machines (Score:5, Interesting)
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The literal translation is actually votecomputer.
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Van Eck phreaking? (Score:1, Informative)
Radiation???? (Score:4, Funny)
Some tin foil would solve that problem.
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crimes against UI (Score:3, Funny)
On democracy (Score:3, Funny)
Colourblind (Score:5, Informative)
Good heavens. As a a person with good old-fashioned red/green colourblindness I assure you that this statement is false.
There is no way that 4% of men can't distinguish between red and green. There's some difficulty in some circumstances, but a green on red colour screen on a voting machine would almost certainly be readable. They'll use high-contrast hues.
The vast majority of red-green colourblindness results from a cone deficiency. In some circumstances it's difficult to make out some differences, but if I see a red shirt, I know it's red and not green. Green lettering on the red shirt would likely be completely readable.
However, I seldom see purple. Usually it looks blue to me.
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PS: I prefer to call it red colorblindness, as I have no trouble seeing
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If the only problem with the machine is the colour scheme, Would it be too hard to put a theme menu on the screen before you start that will let you choose from a handfull of prebuilt themes or at leasts prompts for a background colour and a font colour.
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However, I seldom see purple. Usually it looks blue to me.
There's a "Green on Red" colorscheme now?! (Score:2)
Green on Red with high contrast hues?! It may be readable by 4% of men, but 90% should get a splitting headache, and the remaining 6% will most likely end up having seizures.
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In summary: If it were a red and green scheme optimized for human readability, that's one thing. A red and g
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Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] links to this page [geocities.com] of Ishihara plates, which is pretty thorough. There's also sites like VisCheck [vischeck.com], which can take an existing image or webpage and simulate viewing it with color blindness.
Wrong, voting machines are winning the battle. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Voting machines (without a paper trail) make it impossible to verify the fairness of an election"
In addition, they have gone to show how election results could be manipulated, and how cast votes could be read from outside the polling station. The protesters have had a lot of success getting a number of machines removed from the elections, and they have certainly managed to put the issue onto the political agenda and the public debates. However, with all this media coverage, they are failing to state, re-state and re-re-state their principle argument: that there is a fundamental problem with using voting machines. I have never heard one of their spokespersons state that fixing these small problems with the computers is not enough, and is basically a side-issue. The machine's proponents have taken this opportunity to turn the fundamental problem into a side-issue.
The press, politicians (who want to use voting machines) and the voting machine manufacturers jumped on the issue, stating: "You are right, there's an issue with certain machines but we'll get it fixed". When the machines get fixed, the protest group's role will have been played out. Any subsequent complaints about the fundamental issues with voting machines will be dismissed by the public as whining from a group who are just looking for any excuse to go on protesting.
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That's a good point. I never looked at it that way.
But regardless of whether or not we find electronic voting distasteful, there are many legitimate reasons why is is desirable over paper and pencil. The most obvious is for counting votes -- computers save time and money. In theory, the vote counts can be available the instant the polls close, and we need to hire fewer people to administer an election.
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Ahhh.. only in a capital-obsessed culture is this even a meaningful reason, much less a valid one.
I, for one, am willing to pay more if it means ensuring the integrity of my co
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Well they could say "we are no longer the knights that say Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet, now we are the knights that say We still don't trust voting computers[but in dutch, natch!]"
Somebody could always start the New Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet and complain about something else. And given that there are always hacks t
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I'm no colour co-ordinator but (Score:1)
"Deathblow: When someone kills you not because of who you are, but for other reasons entirely"
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But what if someone just looked over your shoulder (Score:2, Insightful)
It's nice to see that someone cares about the secrecy of the voting process, but I would think that integrity in the vote count itself would take a much higher priority over this issue.
In some remote way, it reminds me of the military's concern long ago (and largely before my time) over the use of IBM Selectric typewriters, as the RF emissions (i.e. coils and motors starting and stopping, a primitive spark-gap transmitter in a sense) from the mechanisms could be detected and reconstituted into what was b
Secrecy and Integrity (Score:2)
A union leader or employer could demand that you vote for a certain candidate and verify that you obeyed. Someone could offer you money to vote one way or another, paying up after the vote has been verified--and people complain about votes being "bought and sold" now. A person may indicate one way on an open petition to avoid being ostracized, but can vote his true feelings on a secret ballot. This
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So when the votes are tallied, if they can figure out who you voted for, it isn't counted. Isn't that kind of the opposite of the situation in Florida and Ohio in the last elections? Do you only count those votes that you can't determine who they voted for?? Which candidate gets the indeterminate votes?? This sounds like a brilliant system - I'm sure Katherine Harris would support it...
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I should have said:
If an interested party can tell who some or all people voted for, those votes are completely worthless and should not be counted at all. If a candidate, organization, or even union can strong-arm you into voting one way or another and then verify that vote through means either subversive or legitimate, the election is a farce. We all roll our eyes when a brutal dictator "wins the
TEMPEST (Score:3, Insightful)
a few years ago this was a big deal and everyone was worried that the government was going to use radiation emitted by CRT monitors to reconstruct what was on the screen, people even made special fonts that minimized this by blurring and breaking up the edges of glyphs.
then LCD's became cheap enough for just about anyone to buy.
i wonder if these machines use a CRT monitor
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so?
Van Eck phreaking is the process of eavesdropping on the contents of a CRT or LCD display by detecting its electromagnetic emissions. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking [wikipedia.org])
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TEMPEST covers any sort of unwanted emission of information.
What's wrong with paper anyay? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pushy sales jobs make me nervous, and these things are being hawked like a $500 used car.
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Keeping a count of all these without some form of help is pretty annoying. I guess you could have stations, where each one counts only a particular ballot measure. That would probably be the m
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Remember, the basis for a democracy is that people must be able to trust the vote. IMHO, that means that the voting mechanisms must be transparent. In order to achieve that, every single stage of the voting must be understandable by
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How do you know that it's properly administered? Have you seen "Hacking Democracy"? The testers tried to hack a test election. They set up a system with an optical scanner. The scanner reads ballots, prints a receipt, and puts the results on a memory card. The card is then taken to a computer to tally the votes from many scanners. Someone tampered with the memory card (not the sca
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If all it does is validate the paper, and the original ballot is what's counted, then that's a good use of technology in voting. But it sounds like you're saying the scanner is what counts the votes. If so, then it's an opportunity for fraud. If someone can gain access to the machine before the election, or gain access to someone who already has access to the machine, it can be hacked. Either something can b
These aren't the reasons we're looking for (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, having a machine that specifically reads voter responses for the purpose of comparing them with the machine's reported voting results might be an EXCELLENT thing. If the tally's don't match, we'd know something was afoot.
How is this a "Death Blow"? (Score:2)
Never let the truth get in the way of a sensational headline
Some background info (Score:2, Informative)
Obligitory Kramer quote (Score:2)
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheLittleKicks.htm [seinfeldscripts.com]
SMS voting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about it. You get the candidates on TV, mebbe have them compete somehow. Have some experts in politics and government ask them questions that the candidates must answer. We can even have them tour the country making public appearances to try and gather support!
And here's the best part: The people actually get to vote for who gets to be President! Just send a text message to 1-800-VOTEUSA and choose your favorite candidate!
Imagine the ratings!
eInk? (Score:2)
Umm, probably not (Score:2)
In all seriousness, though, I suspect you're right. Not only is the refresh rate of these displays low (so no use for B&W films
However, without anyone testing I would not assume to be right yet. Leave the chicken wire and the tin foil hat in place for now..
Man (Score:2)
It's simple: you have 32 buttons and a single, old-fashioned red LED display. Each of the 32 buttons can hold a few lines of text. Then, you display instructions on the main screen, and change the buttons accordingly. So when you vote for "Bob Smith", the BIG button you put says "Bob Smith". Why are we screwing around with this? Let's do things the old-fashioned way: with dedicat
Why so complicated? (Score:2)
You could have laughably simple programmable logic to do that, which could be exhaustively audited for backdoors and whatnot. Using something like CE is equivalent of using a flamethrower inside your home to kill a bee..
I design electronics for living so please use all the big words you like..
And for the summary.. This is a deathblow? B