Ask a "Star" of HBO's Voting Machine Documentary 342
Herbert H. Thompson, PhD ("Hugh" to his friends), is one of the people featured in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, that Diebold tried to keep from airing. Hugh is a long-time Slashdot reader who called me to volunteer for this interview — on his own, not through anyone's PR department. Here's a YouTube excerpt from a CNN Lou Dobbs show with Hugh in it. (Find more articles by and about Hugh here. And perhaps check this brand-new MSNBC story about e-voting, too.) Hugh suggests that you give him "your wildest questions about what went on behind the scenes and how safe the e-voting systems actually are." Let's take him up on that challenge, hopefully while following Slashdot interview rules. Note to Diebold and other voting machine companies: We welcome comments and questions from you, same as we welcome them from everyone else. If you feel you are being vilified unfairly by Slashdot readers, please respond and set the record straight.
Will We Ever Get This Right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Simple Architectural Problem? (Score:2)
The UI program issues the voter a paper receipt, to be used in the event of a recount. He she
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will E-voting ever reach standards rigorous enough to satisfy the American populace? If not, why?
Because current "rigorous standards" are neither. I mean, we have poll workers taking Diebold machines home [bradblog.com] for WEEKS before the vote. The weaknesses of these machines are well documented. This practice is so freakin' insecure it's just insane.
If you applied the same standards that are applied to, say, Nevada slot machines [nv.gov], with a few extras like verifiable paper (or other durable m
paper trail? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:paper trail? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sort of a follow up, how do the states/districts decide what machine to go with? Is it a standard "go with the lowest bidder", is this why we see such shoddy machines going into action? Do the decision making organizations tend to have specific features they look for? Anything else you would like to share about the decision making processes that you have seen?
Thanks for doing this also!
Re:paper trail? (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the salesmen there seemed to steer you away from the bubble-fill devices, stating that they were cheaper up front but would cost more in the long run with paper costs. I still liked them the best. They have multiple ways of recovering from problems - built in paper trail, still work under power outages, and anyone that can play the lottery can use them.
I took some pictures if you're really interested. [flickr.com]
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They aren't [pcworld.com].
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BTW thank you for participating in the process. I am frightened about the state of elections in this country, but recognize that it's not the fault of you or the other poll workers. It's the fault of those who design the processes and select the equipment (and the suppliers of said equipment).
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Of course like with anything there will always be ways to commit election fraud, but can we at least make it difficult?
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The customer in this sense would be the governmental entity itself.
Re:paper trail? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the point of the printed reciept is NOT for the voter to take it home. The point is for him to put it in a ballot box. Then it's no longer in his possession, so the laws to prevent vote-buying don't apply.
The printed "reciept" is actually the official ballot, and subject to recounts and audits. The voting machine becomes simply a ballot marking aid - which can opportunistically take a count as it operates. The machine's count can be used for rapid return reporting, but only becomes the official count if there are no challenges and the precinct doesn't happen to be randomly selected for auditing.
With a spit-out printed ballot added to the voting machines, the rest of the current software can remain in place. With an audit trail any fraud can be detected and corrected. (Further: With random sampling and the inevitable recount requests in close races and those where fraud is suspected, it is LIKELY to be detected.)
In the absense of the ability to untracably corrupt the count, voting macine fraud attempts become much less likely - and a path to prison rather than to political power.
Largest Inherent Flaw? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The paper also discusses a modification of ThreeBallot that uses exchanged receipts. Again, check it out:
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ThreeBallot can be used directly, or as an auditable paper trail for an otherwise electronic system. It doesn't need to be any more complicated for the voters, but it provides a way to check that votes are being tallied correctly.
If you were going to set up an e-voting system (Score:2)
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Typo (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re: Typo (Score:2)
Don't fret -- the typo is evidence that they hire real programmers!
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Theory Vs Practice (Score:2)
I ask this because of a quote, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut. Which occasionally appears at the bottom of Slashdot. I interpret it that the theoretical side of the world is constantly criticizing the pa
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I think that when there is a difference between theory and practice, that it simply means that the theory is wrong. A right theory will hold up in practice. Otherwise it is not right. So this should not be seen as a criticism of theory or theorists in general, but an exhortation to have right theory.
All too often that quote is taken to mean "Well, I don't know jack about this, but I'm not an academic who has stu
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That's a nice theory. Does it hold up in practice?
Why do you think Diebold Doesn't Just... (Score:2)
Here is my question... (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you prove that foul play (hacking) has been involved?
Do you even have a plan in place to check the results?
Please note that this is a very serious question. There was a saying, a few years back, that said a novice hacker is someone known in a small circle, a confirmed hacker is someone who is known all over the Internet, and a great hacker is someone who is totally invisible.
What if the election was subtly hacked, in a way that left lingering doubts (51%-vs-48% kind of results and all that), but no solid proof?
OT: Republican victory (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re: Here is my question... (Score:2)
Obviously we should apply the Intelligent Design movement's latest algorithm for proving that God (or some other unnamed being with supernatural powers) tampered with biology.
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I'm waiting for someone to get caught red-handed rigging an election and then try to say that God did it (probably because God hates Democrats.)
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Despite my reputation, here, I'm not being a smart-aleck. What if, as a variation on your scenario, the guy you want to win does so by fairly tight margin? People who think that narrow victories are a sure sign of a vast conspiracy against them personally are looking right past the reality: modern communications (rabid media coverage, the internet, etc) and technology
OSS? (Score:5, Interesting)
How do you think open source could fit into this issue? Or should it?
Re:OSS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Before I poo-poo the idea, let me say I like the idea of OSS implementations of anything the government does: they pay for this implementation in my dollars, so I might as well get a chance to see how it works. But this does not make the system more secure.
Even with OSS, you're relying on an assurance by some clerk at the polling station that the code you've audited at home is the code that drives your voting choice from fingertip to election commission. You can't SEE software, and as this crowd knows, rootkits can virtualize the whole machine to appear to run one thing while really doing something else.
The only way for an individual to audit their vote is to see their vote on a tangible artifact, be it marks on paper, holes in paper, colored beads or whatever works in your village. It's already bad enough that you can't follow that vote artifact out of the voting booth into the counting center, and watch it every step of the way, but with many eyes from all vested parties along the path, you can have a small sense of security in this process.
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- you need to inspect the compiler and other tools as well (see the famous Trusting Trust compiler hack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor [wikipedia.org])
- you do not control the hardware, you don't know what goes on at the lowe
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Pen-and-paper voting (Score:5, Interesting)
Re :Pen-and-paper voting (Score:5, Insightful)
The "problem" is that it doesn't shuffle enough of your tax money into corporate pockets.
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1. Handicapped access. In order to fit the 30 or so different races/items/etc on one piece of paper, the print on the paper ballot was very small - if you can't read the ballot, it makes it very hard to vote. The electronic machines can show larger text or can "read" ballots to a voter with vision problems.
2. Printing costs. There were 33 diffe
Re:Pen-and-paper voting (Score:4, Insightful)
It demeans the real challenges faced by individuals with handicaps to suggest that we need to diminish the reliability of our electoral system in order to encourage their participation.
2. Printing costs.
Costs for paper / pencil only systems are significantly less than for electronic systems, particularly when election administration is centralized (see Canadian electoral system costs). This is even before you consider that electronic voting equipment is being amortized over an absurdly long period of time (far longer than their estimated useful life. I would bet there will be a lot of counties writing off systems after the next cycle that still have significant unamortized book value).
3. Storage costs.
Storage costs are increased with electoral equipment. The equipment itself needs to be stored and takes more room than paper ballots. Further, the equipment typically has more stringent environmental requirements (temperature, humidity, etc. control) for the storage facility than paper ballots. Paper ballots need to be stored for less time than equipment. Paper ballots can be destroyed once disputes relating to them have been settled, and only have a useful life of at most one electoral cycle. Equipment must be stored throughout its useful life.
4. People.
It takes candidates' representatives and two officials from the authority conducting the election to count ballots in precinct. These are individuals who are already involved in the process, observing and administering (respectively) the conduct of the voting process of the election.
5. Quicker results.
We know who our Prime Minister is before bed-time EST on election night. How about you? Vote counting is a highly parallelizable activity.
Regardless, is it appropriate to set cost and speed above accuracy and security in elections administration?
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Disregarding all of the flippant comments this question will undoubtedly draw, the simple answer is accuracy. Paper tabulation is inherently inaccurate, as evidenced by the 2000 Florida debacle.
The goal is to eliminate recounts (Score:2)
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So anyone who didn't vote for the winner has been disenfranchised?
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In case you missed the last election, I'll sum it for you in two word: hanging chads.
That, plus the huge amount amount of federal money that was made available shortly thereafter to the states to fix the mess, and election officials who, not knowing any better, opting to spend it on a shrinkwrapped product sold by very few vendors.
Note that what's missing from the equation are feder
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It is illegal to only have pen-and-paper voting. There must be handicapped access, and rather than multiple systems, it is easier and cheaper to have just one system. One system, all paper = illegal. One system, all electronic = legal.
The greatest threat to e-voting? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: The greatest threat to e-voting? (Score:2)
Or by pre-rigging the machines before delivering them to the state, to misrecord, mistransmit, or miscount the votes, or simply misreport
MVC Web Interface with Possible Redundancy? (Score:2)
Re: MVC Web Interface with Possible Redundancy? (Score:2)
Who says we've got a reliable system for electronic commerce?
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Umm... how do you know that the person entering their SSN is the person associated with that SSN? One of the larger issues here, I think, is the odd resistence against voters having to actually prove who they are. That, truly, I don't get. The rhetoric that it's somehow discriminating (against some particular cultural segment) to ask for ID at the polling place is already preventing such measures from happening even where they're still using much more old-fashioned ball
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(And, part of being able to correct if something goes wrong with this would have to be matching up the vote to the SSN, and all of a sudden it
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Red herring. Stop repeating this crap.
Maybe because the two problems have vastly different requirements? Maybe because e-commerce does not require anonymity or secrecy in the same way that voting does? Maybe because in the e-commerce problem, it is essential to prove that a given transaction occurred, and that it oc
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I disagree with your premise here - many e-commerce transactions require anonymity and secrecy... and that's why th
Comparison to older methods (Score:2)
How do we minimise the risk? (Score:2, Interesting)
Given that, by law, voting is anonymous and private and necessarily leaves the voter alone with the device, what can be done to minimise the risk
Why bother voting at all? (Score:2)
Given a choice between being burned alive or shot in the head, I suppose I would choose none of the above.
Why is it so hard? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do you think it's so hard for Diebold and other companies to come up with solutions that work well? Is it a stubborn unwillingness to listen and learn from critics, shere incompetence, or something else?
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Remember Rep Peter King (R NY) said during the voting on Nov 2 2004 "It's already over. The election's over. We won.... It's all over but the counting, and we'll take care of the counting." He said it during a picnic on the White house lawn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3foms6x12U [youtube.com]
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As a software engineer I'm constantly amazed that other engineers think this is simple and easy. The first time I heard about "touch-screen voting machines" I thought to myself, "Now, THERE'S a BAD idea". Voting is much harder to program for than financial transactions are. For o
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1. You have a computerized vote selection system. This does not need to be secure at all, because it will print out the selected votes onto paper in a human readable form. It can be written in TCL/TK
Who cares about Lou Dobbs? (Score:2)
How many voting techologies are this vulnerable? (Score:2)
clearly showed a tampered memory card skewing results in a optical scan machine. On the one hand, at least in this sort of system there is a paper ballot to verify, but it's mind boggling to me that something as simple as a optical scanner could be designed so badly as to allow an attack through the memory cards used for transporting results.
This raises an entirely new set of concerns, and seems to suggest that ma
On Open vs. Closed Networks (Score:4, Interesting)
As a former election judge, I have enough experience to know that rigging a paper election is a daunting, nearly impossible task, as there are litterally thousands of ballot boxes that would have to be compromised for any sort of advanagte (on a state or national scale).
Are these concerns balanced (or even discussed) when officials are purchasing equipment? Do local Board of Elections have not only the expertise, but the concern to ask the right questions? And how do BoE directors react when they hear about your concerns and research?
Simple vs Complex systems (Score:2)
A simple solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
After the voter makes his selection on the e-voting machine, the machine then prints out a piece of paper with the voter's choice on it. The voter reviews it, makes sure it's correct, and then exits the booth and deposits the paper ballot in an old-fashioned ballot box. When the polls close, we have an instant count but if the result is challenged, we have the old-fashioned system to do a recount. Note that "hanging chads" and other such nonsense wouldn't apply, as the machine would print the voter's choice - no question of "unclear marks" or "multiple selections", or other problems that exist with manual ballots today. It seems to me this would satisfy both camps, without requiring a massive rewrite of the software, and minimal physical changes. (These machines must have a port somewhere that a printer could be connected to.) Any thoughts?
Is the Harm Really that Great? (Score:3, Interesting)
All voting systems are vulnerable to fraud. What makes these electronic systems different is that one or a very small number of individuals can engineer a fraud. However, their ability to execute a fraud is limited by the media polls (we will suspect something if the results are inexplicably different than polled) and knowledge of precinct history. Thus the danger from individuals changing the vote seems to really be that they will shift a close race (say 10% apart) one way or another.
However, this sort of shifting close races doesn't greatly degrade the structural force of voting. All candidates will still try to enact policies to garner support whether they need 50% of the votes or only 45%. Much of voting is random, affected by things like personal charisma rather than policy questions so clearly the system doesn't work because we always have the person who 50% want but rather it works because of the structural pressure not to stray to far from what the people want. Or to put it in political science terms what does all the work is the tendency of all candidates to shift to the middle in the long run who actually wins each race isn't so important.
But now comparing the potential for electronic vote fraud to things like machine politics (with conventional ballot stuffing), safe districts, voter disenfranchisement efforts, felon lists etc.. etc.. it doesn't seem like it is such a big deal. Making sure the poling places in the inner city don't have enough machines has a much bigger structural effect, by making sure one group's votes don't count at all, than just giving one candidate a random 10% of the vote. Creating a safe district removes virtually all of the structural pressure of voters on government and it seems far more effective and less dangerous to accidentally strike the wrong people from the rolls or put too few voting machines in some precincts.
In short are we letting our concern over the technology of voting blind us to the bigger issues? Shouldn't we be paying more attention to who gets to vote, how districts are drawn and other conventional aspects of voting than to the potential for individuals to electronically cheat?
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IIRC, the last two Presidential elections had results in particular states (especially Ohio and the ever-problematic Florida) that differed by the media exit polling data by a significant margin. This is why Florida was originally called for Gore in 2000, after all, because that's what the Exit Poll data said. Luckily, a
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You are using a different notion of significant than I am.
The point is that no one denies that the Florida and Ohio races were close. What I'm saying is that in the long run it doesn't really matter if some close races are thrown one way or another. Sure in the short term it seems to make a big difference but in the long run this gets lost in the noise of bad voter decisions and the fact that it won't always be one side cheating.
The point is florida and ohio are exactly what any undetected
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No - you've forgotten about gerrymandering. Once you get power in congress, you can change district borders around to ensure t
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Fixing the wrong problem? (Score:2)
All I have to say is: Thank you. (Score:2)
Accidental quote (Score:2)
Lou Dobbs: "E-voting machines will count at least 3 out of every 4 votes cast in next week's election."
Not simple (Score:2)
Despite the rhetoric to the contrary, the list of requirements for a "perfect" electronic voting machine is quite long and somewhat conflicted. Anonyminity and verification comes to mind.
I have to point out that each successive generation of voting machines has undergone more or less backlash, until the populace came to flush out the details. I believe this should prompt us to stronger and stronger oversight and transparency in designs, but not cause us to give up altogether.
Diebol
You mention standards in the video (Score:2)
Why should we be using voting machines at all? (Score:2)
Why is this an issue? (Score:2)
The problem is that manual counting results in considerable errors introduced during the manual process. Just about all manual processes introduce errors of one sort or another. However, through the history of voting it has been very rare that the margin between the candidates comes anywhere near the margin of error.
This is no longer really true in the US today.
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Curious. There is a significant amount of evidence that the manual counting system used in Canada has an error rate well less than %0.1. There is also significant evidence that e-voting machines (DRE and OpScan) have error rates well in excess of %2.
theft of gem source code (Score:2)
How hard can it be? (Score:2)
About time... :P (Score:2)
For the record, I'm not a fat, gay Republican. I'm a fat, ugly Republican. Huge difference! I seriously need to update my Slashdot F.A.Q. [creimer.ws]
Bad Press (Score:2)
I don't know who Hugh is. (Score:2)
I, for one, have lost faith in the election process. It doesn't bode well for our governmental processes when people don't think that the election process works. For the first time, I understand why other groups who had been disenfranchised by the system feel the way they do; it's rigged. The bad guys (the current leaders of the Republican party) don't care about democracy or the constitution. The just care about power. They'll game elections every wh
Who got it "right"? (Score:2)
My que
What is the option (Score:2)
Your take on Diebold threats. (Score:2)
Stealing Elections To Publicize The Issue? (Score:2)
As a possible remedy, I among others, have been advo
Why fix something that's not broken? (Score:2)
Seriously...I have never understood the real world advantages of e-voting over optical scan pape
These machines will create chaos on Nov 7 (Score:2)
Their only hope is to create chaos nationwide. The only way they can do that is with massive failures of the voting system and creating chaos through aggressive challenging at the polls.
The problem with the current systems... (Score:2)
That's all that's really needed to invalidate vast blocks of votes.
So, if you want to deny people their vote, go in late in the day, and just tamper with the machine in a visible way (cutting seals, etc).
At least with a paper receipt system, they could do vote correlation if the machines were tampered with. And they're already pre-checked by the voter themselves.
What about voting by mail? (Score:2)
Isn't the whole e-voting argument becoming irrelevant, fighting over a soon to be obsolete voting method where people get out and travel to the polls to vo
Voting machines vs Internet vote, why not latter ? (Score:2)
Try to explain to us, why an electronic voting machine would ever be safer, less tamper-proof or in any way superior to an equally expensive internet-based voting alternative ?
* Context/argument *
Today, internet banking is a wide-spread practice, and generally accepted as reasonably tamper-proof.
A similar internet-based vote validation system should offer the same (or even better) reliability levels as any electronic voting machine could.
The problem of tampering could be even further reduce
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That's nothing. Diebold executives can tell you who will win before the election starts! :-)
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