Voting with PCs: Yay or Nay

[Player0]

There is a lot of news around lately about replacing mechanical voting booths with computers. It, like everything in life, has a good deal of opposition. People are scared of change, and always fight it.

Of course the media loves to play it up, how hackers could potentially get in and rig things, and throw the vote off.

Now, I would certainly argue the importance of voting in the first place. You got the republican candidates, and the democratic candidates, and a bunch of other people with no chance in hell of getting elected. Does it make much difference if we elect republicans or democrats? I dont know if I've seen any proof. Your just picking one evil or another. What kind of democracy is that? Anyway...off topic...

It occurs to me that I do important things with computers all day. My company has gigs and gigs of engineering plans and stuff on PCs. Medical, Legal, Federal agencies all rely on computers. The military. I do my banking online. I do my taxes online. I run e-businesses online. Computers control traffic lights and power grids, etc.

And now we want to keep computers out of the voting system? Beleive me! Im more worride about the computer controlling my airplane!

Our voting system is troubled, as we very well saw by the last election. Citizen voting is a farce anyway. The electorial congress takes care of that. Kind of like a mask to prevent us from doing anything stupid (as Americans are inclined to do).

There are SO many things they could do. What if they made 10% of computerized voters replicate their votes mechanically? Use that as sort of a 'checksum' to make sure that there aren't too many errors. Voter registration is supposed to prevent fraud. Digital IDs, etc. If someone wants to throw votes, they will have to jive with Digital IDs that havent yet voted. It seems almost impossible to do this from the outside.

Then i see reports of how programmers could change the voting software to throw elections. WTF? First off, you can have any piece of software audited. Secondly, if you gave people a way to confirm their votes later online, you could make sure that thigns went through accordingly. Thirdly, it would be easier for a vote counter to cheat counts than it would be for a programmer to do it. Every system needs checks and balances. Im not convinced its easier to stupefy a computer than it is a person doing manual labor. In fact, the errors in manual counting is the reason we're talking about this in the first place.

Thoughts?

[Synthohol]

i rely more on computers than "chads":)

[Kabooka]

You could eliminate all of the multi lingual by hyperlinking photos of the candidates..... hehe

[Gregorach]

This is an issue I've been follwoing quite closely recently., and I have to say I'm appalled. The current setup of close-source, unverfied, auditless, remotely adminstered computer voting is a total disaster for democracy. The electoral process must be transparent - currently, even election officials aren't allowed to inspect the machines. When you realise that the half-dozen or so companies which make these machines are all large contributors to the Republican party (one of them was even founded by a man who is now a Republican senator), then I think there's a far greater danger than 3rd party hacking to worry about. When you then further realise that exit polling (the internationally accepted means of verifing election results) is being discontinued at the same time, I think you'd have to be ridiculously naive not to smell a rat.

For example, recently the CEO of Diebold systems (the largest maufacturer of voting machines in the US) stood up at a fundraiser that his company sponsored for President Bush, and promised that his company would "deliver" the votes to keep him in office for a second term!

In another interesting incident in Comal county, Texas, the Repulican candidates in each of the elections (state, county and judiciary I think) each won by exactly 18,181 votes - tallied on paperless voting machines, with no exit polling. Seem suspicious? Then there have been the "misaligned touch screens" that counted what voters thought we votes for the Democrat candidate for his Republican opponent.

Recently, it was discovered that the Diebold touch-screen voting system runs on an Access database. While the app was riddled with other flaws, as a database programmer that tells me all I need to know - you cannot properly secure or audit an Access database. Some analysts are saying that the app looks like it was designed for fraud.

While I think computerised voting can be made to work, it needs several elements that are currently notable only by their absence:

1. Any computerised voting system must include a voter-verified paper audit trail.
2. All systems must be subject to independant verification and review.
3. Election officials must be able to verify that the machines are working correctly.
4. Voting machines should not be connected to phone lines during voting.

[unacceptable_risk]

Well we use a different system to the US, similar to the UK.
I have been a fan of the pc vote for some time now, why?
Because the government claims that it costs bulk millions to hold an election. I would personally like to see compulsory voting ditched and referendums become a regular part of life, electronically through post ofices or the like. Right now the government here that I helped elect, is making important descisions that were never up for debate when we voted here some years ago now, and I by no means support these descisions yet am powerless to stop the clowns I voted for from doing whatever they want.

My bottom line is, that if the voting process could be made cheaper/easier, then referendums may happen a little more often around here, and that would be great.

[Gregorach]

Well, I've been away for a couple of weeks so I apologise if I'm digging up old threads, but I think this one's important...

While there is an issue with the accuracy of manual vote counts, it's not really a biggie. Since manual counting errors are random, it's highly unlikely that they'll strongly favour one candidate over another - they'll tend to balance out. And if the count turns out to be close, you can at least go back and count them again. Also, a manual counting process can be independantly monitored - in the UK, if you want to watch the count, you can.

On the other hand, with a pure computer voting system, there is no way to recount - the tally produced by the machine is the one and only final tally. If it turns out that the machine has been malfunctioning or incorrectly set up, there is no way to figure out what's happened.

As for the idea that it's easier to manual counter to cheat counts than the guy programming the voting system, I think that's farcical. A manual counter can only miscount a proportion of the votes, whereas the programmer can miscount all of them (or any proportion he chooses). It's perfectly easy to write a rountine that counts 10% of votes for one candidate as votes for another (as an aside, it's equally easy to do this with the older mechanical voting machines). Currently, only Iowa requires any kind of auditing or inspection of voting machine code AFAIK, and the companies making these machines have sucessfully prevented inspection of their code by claiming that it's commercially confidential. So basically you have a situation where the vote is counted in secret by private companies, with no means of checking its accuracy. Oh, and those companies are in bed with one of the contending parties...

I've gotta say I'm suprised that this issue hasn't attracted more comment... Surely if you're concerned about stuff like the current RIAA tactics or copyright law, then you should be even more concerned about the process by which the people who get to make those laws are appointed? Or maybe the whole concept of democracy is passing out of fashion?

[tripodal]

Originally posted by Gregorach
Or maybe the whole concept of democracy is passing out of fashion?


*Shudder*

[spldart]

Nah on the PC voting. I'd rather have a proprietary electronic voting system handle the chore. To many people no PC's better than I and that makes me nervous on security issues.



>ya mean like some hacker changing your vote as easily as editing your post??:)