E-Voting Report Finds Problems with Modern Elections 165
JonRob writes "The Open Rights Group has released a report on challenges faced by voting technology. Using the May 2007 Scottish/English elections as a testbed, researchers have collated hundreds of observations into a verdict on voting in the digital age. 'The report provides a comprehensive look at elections that used e-counting or e-voting technologies. As a result of the report's findings ORG cannot express confidence in the results for the areas we observed. This is not a declaration we take lightly but, despite having had accredited observers on location, having interviewed local authorities and having filed Freedom of Information requests, ORG is still not able to verify if votes were counted accurately and as voters intended.' The report is available online in pdf format for download."
whats wrong with paper tickets anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why I don't have a PDA (Score:5, Insightful)
The major reason that the unwashed masses don't really care about paper vs electronic ballots is that they really don't care about politics and voting. If this was to do with something important to most people (eg. What is on TV tonight) then you'd get people interested.
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Blindness and other disabilities. Sure you could print braille ballots. So how about paraplegia, bilateral hand amputation, etc.? DRE voting machines can be adapted for a suck-and-blow interface. I can't think of a paper adaptation except for having someone else help the voter.
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An excellent solution.
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Well, that really defeats the purpose of a secret ballot, then.
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Then just have a trusted witness. Judges, notaries, court clerks and most religious figures are already authorized to bear witness for official documents. Just have one on hand, or let someone bring their own if there's an issue. The ballot is still a secret, because the person's vote will be held in confidence.
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1)Secret electronic ballot, but no verification on the count, risking all of our right to vote being comprimised. But a small minority of the people who have problems voting may be able to get a secret ballot. Maybe. If those alternative input methods are actually developed for all needs. I see the ggp post does not help the blind and deaf for example.
2)Secret paper ballot, no help offered. The vast majority of people get to
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In theory the idea is that if there is alergations of ballot paper tampering then we can go back and ask the person who they voted for and check the ballot paper. Not that it ever happens in practice, even when there has
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That someone could also be someone chosen by the voter or they could appoint someone to ack as their proxy. Proxy (and absentee) voting is likely to need steps to prevent organised fraud. However it isn't the job of the state to cover the voter being simply foolish.
For the seeing impaired (but not blind) use large fonts on special paper and have vision magnification machines they can put them under in a s
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face it, there's better things for us to be doing.
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They have to find some way to interface with the world, whether by feet, hands, assistance, or voice command to a computer. But then for their vote to have any verified chance of being counted, they will also need some way to verify its contents after being printed out to a physical copy, either by touch (braille) or by sight.
Using a computer interface is N
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"Hey, buddy, bring me a receipt that says you voted for 'John B. Asshat' and I'll give you $100 cash. Sound good?"
Any and all paper records need to be kept confidential, which is slightly easier (but definitely not foolproof) if the government maintains those records.
=Smidge=
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however, i do not like the idea of electronic vote counting. make the machine simply print out a standard human-readable ballot and have actual people count the damn things, just like we do now, which makes a electrion difficult to rig, and still allows for the benefits of the electronic voting machines.
we get the best of both worlds that way.
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Well, except for the fact that you've just replaced a $0.25 pen or $1.29 sharpie marker with a $600 electronic voting machine for a somewhat marginal benefit. There's a good argument for having one electronic voting interface that prints out pre-filled paper ballot for the disabled, but buying a significant number of electronic voting machines is simply a waste of taxpayer money.
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though I'm just fine with pure paper ballots, as the system up here in Canada has worked just fine and in all likelihood will continue to work fine for the foreseeable future, and even my grandma (who is 94 and legally blind) can use our big, simple ballot
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98% of people being able to cast a reliable vote is much more useful than 100% of people being able to cast an untrustworthy vote.
Letting blind people vote is absolutely an interesting problem, but spending a hundred thousand dollars per polling station to require everyone to use untrustworthy electronic voting machines is an absurd solution. That's like requiring that everyone run the Boston Marathon in a wheelchair.
Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway? (Score:4, Informative)
Long history of people cheating them (While the current system sucks, a combo of electtronic + paper if properly done, can double our chances of catching fraud)
Takes too long to count.
Takes up a lot of space.
Costs a lot more money.
If someone is removed from the ballot, we have to reprint, which may not happen in time
Delivery must be assured with enough to all, which means a lot of waste
Blind people have issues
People that don't read english have issues
Ballot design for large number of possible candidates - people seriously want to be the guy on the top of the list, it gives a small, but real boost to their numbers
Oh wait, you just wanted ONE issue. Hm. Hard too choose just one.
Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of all the issues you list (and I'm sure others could come up with additional problems) not a single one of them is an issue around the ability to tally the numbers with accuracy.
National holiday (Score:2)
You need all day to vote? (Score:2)
At least in the USA you have to be given enough time off to vote.
More fundamentally many think encouraging everybody to vote is a good thing. I disagree. Encouraging everybody to become informed is a good thing. IMHO Keeping the uninformed from voting is actually a good thing.
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How much is enough? If you come in a half day late because the election organizers dropped the wrong machines off at your precinct and when the correct machines were brought in hours later, half of them didn't work, is that "enough time off"?
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Case in point, the reporting on the incompetency of the Bush administration in its first 4 years prior to the 2004 election. I wasn't fooled, but apparently more than half the American public was, although it helped that they wanted to be fooled because the so-called liberal media were marketing or white-washing a right-wing nightmare as a seductive pipe-dream.
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Voting is pretty important. I think that any potential downside of giving people the whole day off, even every year for local elections, is a risk I'm willing to take.
All day would be nice (Score:2)
It should take a lot more than half an hour (Score:2)
I try to stay up with the topics, but the day of the election I always make a point of making sure I know about every politician (regardless of party) and every resolution that will be on my ballot. That in itself takes far more than half an hour. Furthermore, when I lived in Atlanta, it'd take half an hour just to drive to the polling location and find a place to park! Then, there are the lines (usually around early morning and late afternoon/evening because almost no one has the day off). If you're lucky
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Of course, making election day a holiday would help nobody in the states that do voting via mail now.
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One day a year becomes "Election Day", a day off. This will occasionally require emergency elections off-schedule, but it should be possible to schedule most elections into one day a year.
Voting by mail is pretty sketchy.
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However a paper ballot is as you say 100% transparent, and the counting is a highly parallizable problem, leading to quick counting. Typically in a UK parlimentary election the ballot closes at 10pm and all the results are known by lunc
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Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Use a pencil or stamp, not physical holes. No chads!
Keyword IF. Given that electronic systems have been demonstrated to be laughably easy to tamper with, may as well just use all paper and be done with it. You can also serialize the paper ballots using UV reactive ink, barcodes or RFID tags to be sure none are missing when they're counted. Anything that is reasonably impossible for someone to read would work, so they can't associate a particular person with a particular ballot. (Before you ask, you don't have to hand out the ballots in consecutive order, either.)
Paper ballots can still be machine counted. Use those "bingo card" markers (but in black) and you won't have any problems with half-filled circles or fills that aren't dark enough.
I hear the latest electronic systems hold away into your shirt pocket when you're done with them. They're also indestructible and can't possibly be damaged if handled roughly or exposed to less than perfect storage conditions for any length of time.
Those electronic kiosks are also free for life, never need maintenance or replacement, specially trained handlers and tighter security.
OR you can post flyers and signs at the voting places, and have the attendant (who checks if you're registered to vote and would presumably hand you the ballots) strike off the name with a sharpie.
District FOO has QUXX registered voters. Send them 1.10*QUXX ballots. Have someone sign off that they received the alloted amount. And, as we all know from previous elections, there are ALWAYS enough machines to adequately serve everyone who shows up.
Hell, done properly with barcodes, you could even print ballots ON DEMAND. Each district gets to print some limited number of "emergency ballots" should they run out.
The electronic machines have special LCD screens that can telepathically project the choices into a voter's brain, too. Those touchscreens? High-res active tactile feedback so the blind guy knows exactly which virtual button he's putting his finger on.
How'd they manage to register in the first place? I mean, it's not like you can have one set of printed instructions posted somewhere, instead of reprinting them on each and every ballot, right? (I would hope we wouldn't need to translate the candidate's names, too... "George W. Arbusto" would probably be MORE confusing.)
If the ballots are serialized (see above) and/or machine readable data is supplied (Datamatrix 2D barcode, RFID chip) then the names on the printed ballot can be randomized. Need more space? We could even use MULTIPLE A4 sized cards. If they're RFID'd and/or barcoded then we can make sure we have a full set from each voter. I doubt we'll ever get that many candidates on one ticket, though.
Yeah, especially when they're all closer to excuses than actual issues.
=Smidge=
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The electronic machines have special LCD screens that can telepathically project the choices into a voter's brain, too. Those touchscreens? High-res active tactile feedback so the blind guy knows exactly which virtual button he's putting his finger on.
Call them out one at a time and have five seconds to touch the screen. Then say "next person" and do not count any touched in that time. If the blind person hasn't decided ahead of time that's going to take a lot of time. But it will encourage them to become informed. The machine can then print out the result in braille and the person can hand it in.
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You can have the ballots printed with counterfoils attached with the same number as the paper. These also need not be printed in sequential number.
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I'm all for immigrants, unless you are native American you came to America as an immigrant. The difference being the families showed up at the door they walked up, signed in, and frequently had their names changed and basically had to learn to read and write english to get by. If you want to speak spanish, pay in pesos, and so on, go to mexico. If you really think America is so great, then learn to integrate your culture and quit forcing
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That's a valid argument, but there's no reason to get separate political issues mixed up with each other.
It's possible to support multi-lingual paper ballots, and it's possible to have mono-lingual electronic voting. Voting fraud is too important an issue to let people get distracted by "they should learn english" vs. "that's racist".
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The only "natural language" you need on a ballot tend to be proper nouns (the names of people and/or political parties) which don't need to be translated in the first place. If low levels of literacy are an issue you can always print logos and/or photographs as well. Instruction
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In most places you have to be a citizen to vote. Usually you need to be resonably literate in respect of at least one official language of a country in order to become a naturalised citizen.
but I've known a couple of high school kids who couldn't read English. Granted, they could speak it well enough, but I digress.
Wouldn't you also need to be literate to use a computer based voting machine? Especially if the instructions are more complex t
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You don't have chads with paper ballots. Since you are marking them not punching them.
Long history of people cheating them (While the current system sucks, a combo of electtronic + paper if properly done, can double our chances of catching fraud)
Unless you have a system where the counting can be verified by the average person fraud becomes a lot easier (and fraud detection becomes a lot harder.)
Takes too long to count.
With many US elections it wouldn't matter if counting took months. Proper p
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Blind voters select a person
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Yeah... So, how do you explain John Howard?
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2) taxpayer funded advertising and cash "tax rebates" - e.g. baby bonus and the fridge magnets.
These are not flaws in our electoral system so much as flaws in the memories and ethics of the voters.
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What I meant human error comes in to play instead of computer error.
There is no guarantee that someone accidentally miscounted your vote.
Its got to happen quite a few times per election.
I still dont know how the US and UK have so many computer voting problems.
I could make a voting system with my hands tied behind my back which would work properly.
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Here's the thing: When there's human error in vote counting, you get a vote wrong. Maybe you get a couple votes wrong. Probably each incorrect vote was an independent mistake, so the errors tend to be random - and random errors will tend to average out.
On the other hand, when an electronic system makes a mistake it's usually because of a programming or configuration error. This will be the same mistake every time, so the error will tend to accumulate in one direction - meaning that it will give some candid
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Hell, you could probably enlarge the font for the visually impaired.
I'm guessing you're not an American (Score:2)
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I'll add another furthermore to that: Cost should be no object when trying to ensure that an electoral system is fair and representative of the wishes of the electorate.
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In most of these cases, the big problems are when people are trusting machines to the _counting_ (not the printing). That's the process which needs stra
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In these cases the ballot is put into the 'Spoiled' pile.
Seriously, what is the problem with you Americans, I've seen my 3 year old neighbour doing Paint-by-numbers and get it in the assigned spaces, how hard is it to follow the simple instruction "Mark the box next to the person you want to vote for with an X and no where else"?
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Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree. Paper systems make a certain amount of human error (feel free to call it 'stupidity,' I won't stop you) visible. Electronic systems hide it. They're not inherently superior.
The problem with the Florida ballots was a fundamental design flaw, combined with human error, combined with procedural mistakes.
You could fix many of the problems experienced in Florida, keeping paper ballots, by redesigning them and fixing the procedure. For example, the "dangling chad" problem of incompletely punched holes could be fixed by replacing the perforated-card ballots with optical ones, and giving the voter a big "dauber" type pen that they simply have to touch to the circle they want to fill in. Thousands of old people do this every day -- it's called Bingo Night. Do it with a UV-reflective marker and you can probably read them quickly using a machine. To prevent double-marks, just mandate that if you accidentally touch the marker to anyplace on the paper outside of a bubble you meant to fill in, you need to get a new ballot and start over. You could even have a 'test scanner' at the voting site that quickly scans a voter's ballot and checks for gross stupidity (double marks, marks outside the lines, etc.). If someone does manage to submit a ballot with two marks, it doesn't get counted, since the only person who can legally determine the intent of a voter is a judge. (I suppose you could put them all to the side and wait to see if the election is close enough to warrant bothering to look at them, but frankly I'd prefer that they just get thrown out. It's too easy to politicize the process of 'determining intent;' better to avoid it completely and only count well-formed ballots.)
Electronic voting covers up some of the inaccuracies of paper ballots and gives a false sense of perfection. They're not. You only think that the total you're getting is free of errors; there's just no way to look at a particular ballot and see if anything went amiss when someone was casting it. Last year when I went to the polls, there was a huge amount of confusion over one old codger who thought he was de-selecting candidates, when he was actually selecting them. I'm sure other people do similarly dumb things when voting -- but an electronic system just sweeps them under the rug behind a facade of digital faultlessness. It's camouflaging stupidity, not eliminating it. Just because the system gives you an output that's 1 or 0 doesn't mean that only ones and zeros went in; it's just being quantized down that way. You have no idea what's really going into it. All sorts of stupidity could be happening and you'd have no idea, just by looking at the output of an electronic voting system.
Hybrid electronic/paper systems are certainly better than paperless systems (which are anathema to democracy, frankly), but there's no reason, aside from a typical American obsession with instant gratification, to have the electronic side at all. There's no reason why we should be compromising our elections, introducing any unnecessary mysteriousness or opacity into the process, just to get the returns a few hours sooner. If it takes a few days to count all the ballots and make sure we do it right before we know the final results, fine! It's not worth the cost, or the risk, of e-voting, just to try to have the "final score" by 8PM on Election Day.
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First, I agree with the basic sentiments of your post. You are, in the main, exactly correct.
But voting systems, given the constraints - perfect anonymity, o
Re:whats wrong with paper tickets anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait a second. They can't even get a machine to punch a clear hole in a piece of paper and you want them to impliment a more complex system? Hanging chads aren't "stupid voters" they are faulty machines. A paper system is highly accurate way to arrive at a true result. You count them all. sure it might take a while, but it will take less than the four years it takes to wait for your next chance to get it right. The Florida election was an excellent example that there are alot of people will to "misplace" votes and that will only be easier when there is no physical human-eye-readable trail.
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Disenfranchise the idiots, That's good! (Score:2)
If your too stupid to punch a hole or mark a box your vote shouldn't be counted.
Sucks to be dumb. There is no law that can change that.
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Diebold's reaction.... (Score:2)
What's the betting they'll sue for some arcane reason? :-)
Nothing is Perfect (Score:2, Insightful)
"I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." - Friedrich Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols
I agree that no system is above corruption - paper ballots included - but the lack of any verification is the greatest issue with the e-voting systems currently in use. Election fraud has been with us since the first Greek citizen was bribed for a vote; however, Diebold and others - with help from elected officials - are making a concerted effort to ensure that there is
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I'm not sure what citizens can do beyond what they have been doing, given our current political climate.
Simple, get a gun and go shoot these assholes. It is part of your Declaration of Independence [archives.gov] and your constitution's second amendment [wikipedia.org]. Those old dead white guys that wrote this stuff in the late 1700's knew what they were doing (better than today's politicians anyways).
I would support electronic voting if... (Score:2)
*Make the code as open and freely viewable as possible. This will ensure maximum review.
* There was a NATIONAL standard. None of this spotty state-by-state Quality Assurance hooplah. Utilize the standard Southwest Airlines uses: find one rock solid, simple standard and stick to it across the board.
* Minimalism over Featurism: Make the system as
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This just makes the hack more expensive, and harder to detect if it's accomplished. Have you ever tried to "audit" an IC?
There is one essential property of a voting system that no purely electronic system can have: A 83 year old retired painter needs to be able to understand
maybe... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Try reading what Bruce Schneiner has to say:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/gett ing_out_the.html [schneier.com]
Of the things he lists, I think the facts that everyone votes on one day & 'we the people' expect results almost immediately are the biggest obstacles to getting a proper count.
In other news.... (Score:2, Funny)
Video at 11.
Electronic Voting Is a Bad Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
But I digress. Let's roll out an analogy here.
Let's say the government contracted out the counting out of paper ballots to private companies. Let's say again that these companies took your paper ballots into a huge warehouse with blacked out windows and wouldn't tell or show anyone how they were counting the ballots. They simply emerged hours or days later and announced the result. Would you be satisfied with this? Would you accept the result?
Let's soften the blow. Supposed the company allowed government inspector into the warehouse to supervise the counting. Would that make you feel more confident in the result?
Now, what is the difference between the warehouse, and the current systems of E-Voting. What is the difference between the warehouse and [b]any[/b] system of E-Voting, present or future? Why accept a computerized count if you wouldn't accept the warehouse. (Of course many people would accept the warehouse, but I digress...)
You know what the depressing thing is. Most people want E-Voting. Not because they think it's cheaper. Not because they think it's more reliable. It's because they think it's cool.
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as for paper trails-- that's easy; just do the voting using opti
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In the US, the FEC requires that the software (source) be reviewed by an approved thrid-party auditor. This should help in theory, but there is no provision for verifying that the binaries loaded, burned, or flashed into the equipment are in fact compiled from the audited source.
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It still is not enough. You cannot know for sure that the code you audited is the one actually running on the hardware it is supposed to run on. A computer is too complex and opaque for a man to verify how it is working.
On the contrary, paper and pencil are verifiable and you can be quite confident that the person counting your vote will see the X you wrote the same way you
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Unfortunately, there is no such thing as an "open source voting machine", because there are no computers that execute only human-readable source code. Making it harder to slip trojans in the source code is better than nothing, but there's still no way to be sure that "the" source code is actually in charge of the voting machines. We've already seen electronic voting machines caught running non-certified
Voter-verifiable counting (Score:4, Interesting)
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In addition to any other vote-counting or verification system, a county
elections office could take a full optical scan of the ballot papers.
The data from these scans would be made available to all who request it;
anyone could acquire the data and perform their own re-count with any
method of their own devising.
This would provide complete transparency for the automated portion of
the counting process.
The problem with optical-mark scanners, of course, is that the
scanner's internal software and firmware is vulnerable to tampering.
Such a tampered machine cannot change the ballots it reads, but it can
misinterpret them.
By providing a raw image scan to the public, we'd be enabling many
eyes to provide their own interpretation of the ballots. Any
optical-scan vulnerability would become moot. We would go beyond a
voter-verified ballot, and get to a voter-verified count.
This is technically achievable with commercial off-the-shelf hardware
for well under $100,000 per county in capital expenditures.
Specifically:
* Industrial scanners of sufficient reliability are available. At my
workplace we have a "light" duty commercial scanner with a duty cycle
of 8,500 scans per day; this machine cost around $7,000. If county
clerks were to have about 5 days to produce the scans, two of these
scanners could completely scan the ballots for all but the largest
counties. And, of course, heavier duty scanners are available.
* Since industrial scanners are not optimized for ballot reading or
even optical-mark recognition, it would be much more difficult for any
malicious entity to successfully tamper with their software to produce
inaccurate ballot image scans. It's much more difficult for software
to produce an incorrect image than an incorrect interpretation of an
image. What's more, these scanners are available from several
manufacturers; if one distrusts any or all scanner vendors, one could
simply scan the original ballots with a variety of different
manufacturers' scanners and compare the results.
* For the standard optical-scan ballot, a fax-quality scan would be
sufficient for a voter-verified count. Better scans are possible for
higher time, money, and data storage budgets, but I don't think they
would be necessary as a practical matter.
* The data storage requirement for an approximately fax-quality scan
of every Oregon ballot - approximately 2 million ballots with 100%
turnout - would be under 500 gigabytes uncompressed per statewide
election. (And ballot scans should be highly compressible even with
lossless and error-correcting algorithms.) Portable hard drives that
large are available for around $300. Most individual county ballot
scan datasets would even fit on larger iPods.
---
This brings up a couple other problems, of course. Foremost, the ballots have to be on ADF-feedable paper, and probably had best be marked ballots rather than punched-paper. Also, the question of what to do with a voter-made distinctive or identifying mark on the ballot needs to be addressed. (Distinctive marks could lead to buyer-verified vote buying.)
But still, it's a huge step beyond just trusting the county's optical-scanning ballot interpreter.
[1: Actually this is my brother's idea, which I have modified slightly.]
the anti-vote-buying laws would ban that. (Score:2)
elections office could take a full optical scan of the ballot papers.
The data from these scans would be made available to all who request it;
anyone could acquire the data and perform their own re-count with any
method of their own devising.
Vote-buyers could pay people to vote a particular way and make
an individual identifying mark in some non-significant part of
the ballot. The scan would enable them to check whether the
voter had voted as
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It's probably true that vote-buying would be a worse problem than inaccurate counting. In Washington (where my brother lives) a ballot with an identifying mark is disqualified. If that were extended to all distinctive marks, then keeping ballot images secret would not be necessary.
(But then people would start arguing over what constitutes a distinctive mark, naturally.)
It is undoubtedly a tough problem all around.
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How can that work in the presence of write-in votes?
Is it really so hard? (Score:5, Insightful)
- the computer stores your vote
- you get a receipt how you voted
- you check and fold the receipt and drop it into a sealed box.
After the election ends, the computer spits out the results.
In randomly selected polling places, the paper receipts get counted manually. If there are major differences, more polling stations will be selected for a manual count.
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From the post you responded to:
- you check and fold the receipt and drop it into a sealed box.
What this does is let you verify that the computer printed the correct votes. No more "hanging chads" or "double-votes" where someone tries to cross off a mis-vote. Then, once you are satisfied that the computer printed the right things, you drop off what is effectively a paper vote. So the men outside cannot know who you voted for.
The benefit here is that the electronic votes are tabulated instantly, so once the pol
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Add "open source" and you've got it (Score:4, Insightful)
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If you mean "ballot", say "ballot". Voting receipts are a bad idea.
You might be trying to imply that the paper ballots are just for a recount, but that's a bad idea too - it's too easy to block a recount like they did in Ohio, even when the presidential candidates in positions #3 and #4 both demanded a full recount.
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What, randomly like in Ohio?
If we actually count the ballots, the count should be legit. If we rely electronic counts and statistical sampling, everyone will assume things are fine even when they're completely fraudulent because "math is hard".
Why not a combination of the two? (Score:2)
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Perfect is hard, but we can do better than straight optical scan. For example, the separation of sorting and counting machines described here [slashdot.org] is pretty good (although I'm not convinced that marking machines are a good idea compared to sharpies).
The old dilemma (Score:2)
I have a suggestion (Score:2)
Great work Jason and everyone else (Score:3, Informative)
I was proud to be part of this observation team and am looking forward to the next project I can give time to.
If anyone here wants to support the Open Rights Group either financially or buy volunteering to join in in further projects, scoot on over to http://www.openrightsgroup.org/support-org [openrightsgroup.org] and sign up!
Well, no particularly big surprise there (Score:2)
It sounds like a typical UK government IT scheme:
In short, such monumental managerial incompetence as to make me question if there are darker forces at work. I know