Information Technology and Voting 128
ChelleChelle writes, "In an interview in ACM Queue, Douglas W. Jones and Peter G. Neumann attempt to answer the question: Does technology help or hinder election integrity?" From the article: "Work in this area is as politically loaded as work on evolution or stem cells. Merely claiming that research into election integrity is needed is seen by many politicians as challenging the legitimacy of their elections... One of the problems in public discussions of voting-system integrity is that the different participants tend to point to different threats. Election-system vendors and election officials generally focus on effective defense against outside attackers, usually characterized as hackers. Meanwhile, many public interest groups have focused on the possibility of election officials corrupting the results."
Motives (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely untrue. What could be more hacker-proof than a paper ballot system?
No, what election officials evidently want is speed and ease-of-use. Hopefully they also want accuracy and precision, but the evidence suggests that many don't value those as highly.
What election-system vendors want is money. They make promises regarding speed, ease-of-use, accuracy, and precision to get that money. They may have excellent intentions, too, but its the profit that motivates them.
"Meanwhile, many public interest groups have focused on the possibility of election officials corrupting the results."
That's always been a problem. It's just that now, the inner workings of many election systems are no longer observable. That makes it very difficult to verify the integrity of the election process.
In the end... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Sincere trust in the vote-counting process
2) Sufficient respect for the system to not make gratuitous accusations
To the degree that people rightly, wrongly or dishonestly don't buy into the system, there's no technology that can prevent that.
That said, that security researcher who is allways linked here, who argues for pencil and paper even though the blurbs always make him out to be a fellow source code-fetishist, is spot-on.
Can't beat paper votes and scrutineers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why bother bringing technology into the voting system? Polls are infrequent, so there's no real cost benefit to automation. It's not like voting is being done every day and needs to be automated.
Lack of speed - disenfranchised voters (Score:5, Insightful)
process, leading to long lines, with waits in the hours.
Many people can't wait that long and have to go to work.
Perception (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember in politics truth is putty.
Re:Can't beat paper votes and scrutineers. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not Luddism if you want a new technology to actually be an improvement before you switch to using it.
Re:Can't beat paper votes and scrutineers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Many counters have counting registers that can be set to start at any offset you like. Start one candidate at +X votes and the other at -Y and so long as X and Y are in the statistical noise you've done your part to help rig an election without giving anyone reason to call for a recount.
Now, given a properly designed electronic system with voter verifiability, any joe can head out to someone he trusts (his computer, the Library, the League of Women Voters, the local Republicrat party office, all of the above) and have them verify that his vote was registered correctly and added into the final count correctly, and you can catch cheating at a very fine level (of course we'd still need to define policy for how to launch an investigation, but evidence gathering can be done by anyone). You can't get that with paper.
Vote By Mail (Score:3, Insightful)
We should probably replace the counting machines with humans, picked from random volunteers and OK'd (and monitored) by each party on the counted ballots, recorded on videotape. One step at a time.
Tech I trust (Score:3, Insightful)