banky's Journal: procon

Ah, voting. Such a lovely little pastime.

I love elections. I lived and breathed elections for quite some time; I was involved in the first-principles design, construction, development, and deployment of the first Votronic, one of the first (if not the first?) touch-screen digital voting machine. (Our model is, as far as I know, no longer in use in any precinct).

And every election, I get stuck in this infinite loop of yes/no on "have they been tampered with???". (By "they" I mean, "machines in general, esp. in critical races where tampering is alleged").

The biggest 2 cons to "are the machines tampered" are, in my humble but correct opinion:
1. Why has no one caught them/how are they (the tamperers) keeping it secret? and
2. Has tampering succeeded every time? And if not, see #1.

That's really what it comes down to. Forget about EVERYTHING ELSE anyone has ever said about hotel mini-bar keys and paper trails and all that.

Let's get real, here. People are bad at keeping secrets. You're telling me, just because Diebold has so far hidden the source code, that it's a grand sweeping conspiracy? No one ever got drunk and tried to impress a chick? And the hacked code NEVER FAILED ONCE?

I think, really, that's what it comes down to. Having covered the ground over and over, I keep wondering, "How can they KEEP pulling this off without getting busted?". And I keep coming up bupkis.

To work, it has to be the most flawless plan, ever, OR, everyone who thinks - doggedly and deeply - that the vote IS being hacked is just busy writing missives on web sites and not really doing the hard work of finding out the info.

So that's really it. There you go, a freebie. Stop worrying about hotel minibar keys, and start trying to someone with loose lips.

Oh . . .

[GMontag]

That's just what you want us to think! ;)

Re:

[nizo]

Hehe

I don't have a problem with electronic machines, just when there is no paper trail. Hell forget someone actually overtly tampering with it, what if the code is buggy and just starts randomly tallying them wrong? How the hell can you even tell if there is no paper trail????

Today I voted with a paper ballot that was counted by a machine after I stuffed said ballot into the little feeder on the side. Assuming I filled in the little bubbles well (presumably it isn't overly picky there), and assuming it coun

Re:

[GMontag]

Recently I heard a good argument, from an auditing perspective, for that style of machine. I have to say that I kind of like it.

Now, if someone goes through and destroys paper ballots from one candidate, the machine has a tally of its own. However, a problem with that is if the electronic tallies are switched in the machine to another candidate in the same amount as the number of missing paper ballots.

Note to non-auditors: there should be a seperate tally and records of how many and what people voted and

Re:

[nizo]

"washing hands in the bathroom effect."

Hehe, yeah that is exactly it. If at any point control of all the votes is in the hands of a single person, that is a bad thing. I also had a slip of paper handed to me when I got the ballot; the guy watching the voting box took my little slip of paper (with a number on it indicating my line on the voter record) and I assume it got saved somewhere (sadly I wasn't paying enough attention to see what he did with it). So if those little slips are counted, and the total vo

Re:

[banky]

Common tinfoil reply to my, "shit never failed once" remarks is exactly that: "It never failed because a primary engineer was standing right there, observing the election".

I agree, a method by which someone can observe the process would strongly remove most points-of-failure in the process that aren't software (whcih is to say, most of them).

Re:

[banky]

Tinfoil hat banky mode: bugs would almost certainly produce weirdly skewed results that would, broadly speaking, not allow a candidate with a sliver of a lead to get a win.

Except that, the octagenarians don't know how to run the fucking machines, and in every case of every election I personally babysat, the dumb fucks forget how to operate the gear as soon as the nice young man goes to get a smoke and a sandwich.

In the v1 Votronic, the UI was specifically designed to prevent calibration errors by having BIG

On a related note

[GMontag]

Greg Pollowitz notes that Shrum, Buchanan and Scarborough just called for the return of the paper ballot as opposed to voting machines -- because, you know, people can just count between 60 and 120 million ballots much better and more accurately than machines can. Next week, Shrum, Buchanan and Scarborough will call for the return of rotary-dial telephones, Betamax, and the Soviet Union. [nationalreview.com]
- John Podhoretz of The National Review

Optical scan

[ces]

Me I'm a big fan of optical scan ballots because if anything goes wrong with the machine count you have a paper ballot to fall back on.

I also like vote-by-mail because I can sit at my kitchen table and research all of the issues, canidates, and ballot measures at my lesure as well as look up various online voters guides. Plus I don't have to figure out how to get to the polls sometime during the day when I need to be at work.

Not to say that electronic voting machines can't be done right, but why bother when

Re:

[GMontag]

I tried to vote by mail once, but I was too lazy to get the ballot back in the mail, so I drive to Tennessee to vote every 2 years.

Yes, call Loveline to figure out that pathology, Dr. Drew will have a fun answer.