LA County Gets State Approval of New Vote-Counting System Using Open-Source Software (latimes.com) 95
A new voting system that uses open-source software for counting ballots has been approved by California elections officials. "The certification of the new tally system for the county paves the way for other improvements, including redesigned absentee ballot packets, in the Nov. 6 election," reports Los Angeles Times. "It is the first election system of its kind, using publicly available source code that has been certified for use in California." From the report: The ballot-counting equipment is part of a broader redesign of Los Angeles County's voting system, which will include new equipment while relying on a traditional paper ballot. The county's existing system, portions of which are now decades old, has been targeted for replacement for several years.
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Ya, it's pretty fuzzy as a story. Not necessarily fake, but the headline is misleading and the text makes some leaps in logic.
To me, "fake" is stuff just made up out of almost nothing - the main business of Breitbart for example.
Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Damn - considering that every single major tech provider from Google through Facebook through...relies fundamentally on open-source software, the idea that our elections rely on - essentially - DOS-based, closed-source systems for every step from voting through counting is beyond bizarre!
Agree, elections after all is not a daily thing, I would say that for the sake of protecting this essential democratic tool it is worth to just manually count the ballots by representatives of major parties (on local level of course) and compare the results. Are we so lazy?
Regarding the closed software issue: some time ago I heard a podcast about software to guide judges whether to allow bailout or not - the software is closed source, and when the redactor asked why not open source ALL the experts in the d
Nice gesture, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to look at the source is great and everything, but which actual bits are installed and configured on the machines is another matter.
Anything with a general purpose CPU shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the election system. A volunteer observer with a high school education should be able to verify, by simple inspection, the operation of any machine involved with counting/processing the physical ballots.
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Being able to look at the source is great and everything, but which actual bits are installed and configured on the machines is another matter.
Also, more verification in the areas that haven't experienced any widespread election fraud isn't exactly going to help.
Meanwhile voting records in Georgia is still deleted and no-one held accountable.
You're welcome, America (Score:4, Interesting)
California leading the way once again. While Georgia is closing polling stations in majority-black counties, California demonstrates how to have fair and honest elections. And guess what? When the elections are fair and open and all the citizens get to vote, you get good government.
Re:You're welcome, America (Score:5, Informative)
This is not about the ballot. If you read the summary, you'll see California is already using paper ballots. It's about what happens to the data after it leaves the optical scanner. How it's reported, tabulated, stored.
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That's exactly how it's done in Los Angeles county too. The machines in question COUNT them.
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When the elections are fair and open and all the citizens get to vote, you get good government.
Start drinking early tonight, did you.
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Yes, there is much to celebrate tonight. Donald Trump's campaign chairman, deputy campaign chair, National Security adviser, and personal attorney have all been guilty in a court of law, his two sons and oldest daughter are now being investigated by the New York department of revenue and attorney general for fraud regarding the "Trump Foundation" (Donald himself was also named in the suit and investigation) and both his private attorney and publisher David Pecker of
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I'm not sure if you're maybe from elsewhere and unfamiliar with how governments work in the US, but Pelosi and Feinstein are representatives of California or a California district in the federal government - in Washington DC. They are not "California government". See, states each have their own government, and California's is doing great, sweetie.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/fe... [foxbusiness.com]
Bullshit. Never trust a computer (Score:5, Informative)
Being open source is less horrible, but there will still be plenty of opportunity of hacking. Most of this hacking is done by (elected) election officials, not Russians. And the Republicans are far better at it than the Dems.
Go for simple paper ballots. Counted in front of scrutineers appointed by the candidates. The scrutineers then report numbers back to their candidates independently from the official system, so no room for fudging.
This is what happens in Australia. And all the votes are counted by hand within a couple of hours of closing the booths. It is a quick and painless process.
I might add in Australia we also have a slightly more complex preferential system, where you order 1, 2, 3 instead of just one X. This avoids the vote splitting issues that the USA has. But it does require a population that knows how to count, even if they lived in a poor school district.
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Being open source is less horrible, but there will still be plenty of opportunity of hacking. Most of this hacking is done by (elected) election officials, not Russians. And the Republicans are far better at it than the Dems.
I stopped reading right there. You are openly partisan. At leas TRY to keep up a facade of independence when you are dissing the other party. Otherwise folks you are trying to persuade you are right will just stop listening.
I will tell you the following as plainly as I can. There is NO electronic voting system hacking going on, at least none that has changed even ONE vote in any election that I know of. Do you have an example of this? Unless you do, we can discuss future security efforts, but there is
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What takes the long time is other stuff. Often they don't count the ballot at the polling place, which is often in someone's house, a church, a school room etc. So there's time needed to drive the ballots to a counting station. That's where a lot of tampering has a chance of occuring - not altering ballots but losing a box here and there from certain districts.
But that's still minor. We have absentee ballots by the truckloads that need counting. Almost all of this counting happens *after* the winners a
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Just Use Paper (Score:2)
Optical Scan has a killer feature. And that is you can have as many people voting as you have tables. Theres no hardware to break down. If the scanner breaks, go find another one, delay of a few hours at most.
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Agreed, the whole system is fully distributed, no reason to ever ever ever upgrade from paper ballots.
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If it is distributed. Traditionally the ballots are stuffed in a box and then fed into the optical reader somewhere else. That's because it's too high tech for each individual polling place to security transmit the results to a central location, and you run into all sorts of issues that the average election commission is clueless about. How do you distribute certificates reliably (please, please, no preshared keys, this should have better security than the swiss cheese of wifi), how do you train these vol
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In my polling place, you stick your ballot on the machine on the way out and you can see it tick up a mechanical counter on the top.
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Optical Scan has a killer feature. And that is you can have as many people voting as you have tables. Theres no hardware to break down. If the scanner breaks, go find another one, delay of a few hours at most.
the problem I see with this is the security of the paper ballots. Unless you physically or logically secure the stack of ballots from having ballots added, removed or modified, you still do not have a secure system.
I suggest that paper ballots be serialized so they are unique when printed. Then all ballots are tracked to point of use at the precinct. Every ballot given to a precinct must be returned, used or not, and the number of used ballots must match the number of voters who voted. Then as each prec
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In Connecticut, we feed our own ballot into the scanning machine on the way out..
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I think you put it in yourself so you know that it was counted without tampering. I believe the machine has a hopper of all the scanned ballots that can be used as a paper trail.
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Now we risk losing anonymity.
You can make it harder to track who (UUID not a serial number for example), but someone at the polling place could on the sly track the last four digits to people, and since the ballots are tracked by place, you'd likely be able to uniquely identifiy every vote.
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Now we risk losing anonymity.
You can make it harder to track who (UUID not a serial number for example), but someone at the polling place could on the sly track the last four digits to people, and since the ballots are tracked by place, you'd likely be able to uniquely identifiy every vote.
True, but if the serialization is done by barcode, it's really hard (though not impossible) for a human to record information easily. Further, precincts should have multiple election judges who's duty is to monitor each other for such activity. Coupled with a "no electronic device within reach when handling ballots" policy for the election judges I think we can make this really hard to do.
Perhaps the serial numbers can be encoded on the top and bottom of the ballot in a known margin. In this way, the seri
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Barcode only (no human readable number) and prohibition of cameras from anyone working the polls should be enough.
Also, UUID over serial number.
Why do they care? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does California worry about counting the votes, if they would not bother to verify the eligibility of the people casting it?
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You are correct in saying that San Francisco recently allowed non-citizens with children in school to vote in school boar
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There is literally nothing preventing them. And that is the point KKKon$ervative media are making — correctly. The forms at the DMV are the same for all. Whether or not to register to vote is determined by the applicant himself — the DMV employees are neither expected nor even allowed to verify eligibility. Indeed, this is what caused that poor abuela from Kansas to do it, according to this article [nbcnews.com]:
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The cited article describes, how it happened — thus proving, that it can happen.
Why would anyone reject a voter's registration? Based on what? There is nothing on the form, that indicates (in)eligibility to vote — if the applicant asserts eligibility, he is eligible.
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"While it’s true that undocumented residents living in California can obtain driver’s licenses, t
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-1, "When did you stop beating your wife"-style telling a question
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This makes even less sense, than is usual for Left's ramblings...
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The classic example is, "When did you stop beating your wife?" That question is based on the unfounded and unsupported assumption that you did in fact regularly beating your wife, much like your question is based on the unfounded and unsupported assumption that California doesn't verify the eligibility of voters to vote.
Let's see what elaborate corruption they come up w (Score:1)
So where the the alleged open source? (Score:5, Informative)
Is there an actual repository of actual code?
None of the articles (including in technical press) have mentioned where to find the alleged open-source software.
I found plans and progress reports and PDFs and PDFs, and more PDFs, oh, my!
Nary a source file. Nary a mention of language(s) etc.
Can somebody help me find where it is hiding?
Yes, I looked on GitHub. I realize it's not the only place to look, but the most obvious.
From a Pretty PDF:
"This should include making hardware components available for inspection, and source code to the
extent that the manner of doing so would not jeopardize system security or availability."
"available for inspection"? Is this like how your HOA makes documents "available for inspection"? Looking through paper documents in a cramped office with no air conditioning?
And that "extent and manner" means it is not open-source. If it is not ALL open-source (place don't point to passwords, etc. which shouldn't be in a source code repo) then it's not open-source. Period.
Software? SOFTWARE? WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' SW (Score:3)
Good grief, will we never learn? To make it truly unhackable, you use paper ballots, get about 50 people into the room, and count the damned ballots by eyeball. Not that hard.
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Sure. Because none of those 50 people can be bought off, and 50 points of attack is so much safer than one.
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No, you pay off ONE counter in EACH precinct and hope some or most of them get through without an audit by making sure it's not close enough to trigger a recount. You wouldn't have to tilt all of them, and some you would just be making closer rather than in your favor (since all the votes are aggregated anyhow). Steal a hundred votes here, a hundred there, a thousand somewhere else. Keep the margins tight, so that one big victory elsewhere (also assisted by buying a vote counter) can cancel them all out.
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From what I have seen, they scan them optically. Then if things don't check out, they might count the ballots (not the votes, just the actual physical papers) to make sure two didn't get stuck to each other or anything like that. Only if that fails to resolve the discrepancy do they actually count votes manually, and only that particular batch that the machine barfed on.
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To make it truly unhackable, you use paper ballots, get about 50 people into the room, and count the damned ballots by eyeball. Not that hard.
Maybe you need to scan the posts you are replying to optically, instead of just going with your idiot talking points.
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I trust a dumb machine that just counts and does nothing else over 50 people doing that same counting. Even if they're all honest, the 50 people are going to make more mistakes unless the machine is broken.
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It is possible to have a discussion without the ad hominem attacks, but it is beyond obvious that you don't want to discuss, you want to inflict abuse. Go die in a fire.
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No, you pay off ONE counter in EACH precinct and hope all of them keep your secret...
That is the flaw. Conspiracies are hard, because someone always talks.
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Maybe they talk, but by then it's too late to do anything but take down some bag men. How many elections have been negated due to tampering or fraud? None in the U.S. at least.
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Fine, there's nothing you can do about corruption, but what we don't need is a bunch of f'n Russian techs in Moscow screwing with the elections by attacking electronics.
Blockchain voting please (Score:1)
Blockchain is literately made for this task. Seems a waste to go any other direction.
That's Great - now about the voter registration (Score:2)
*sigh* This... xkcd from a short time ago. TRUTH (Score:1)
https://xkcd.com/2030/ [xkcd.com]