You don't want or need people to be able to prove who they voted for. Think prove you voted for gore or I will break your knee cap. You want to be able to prove that all the votes that where casted can be counted. Which is easy with a paper voting system. You can sit there and watch the election officials open an empty ballot box, and then watch everyone insert their ballots. You can then watch as the election officials count the votes.
You don't want or need people to be able to prove who they voted for. Think prove you voted for gore or I will break your knee cap. You want to be able to prove that all the votes that where casted can be counted. Which is easy with a paper voting system. You can sit there and watch the election officials open an empty ballot box, and then watch everyone insert their ballots. You can then watch as the election officials count the votes.
SarcasticDwarf
Diamond Member
- Jun 8, 2001
- 9,574
- 2
- 76
You could replace the cartridge (though that is sealed). The problem is actually getting to a large number of them. The procedure works something like this: A team of people goes around the warehouse where they are stored and inserts a verified blank cartridge and then seals it in. The cartridge SN is recorded. The machines are locked and sent to the locations. Every member of the voting location looks at all the seals and verifies that they are intact. You then run a paper report from the voting machine showing how many votes are currently in the system (should be zero). This is the signed off on by all team members. Throughout the election you verify that the number of voters on the machine matches what your paperwork shows. After the election the cartridge along with one paper report set is sealed in an envelope by the team and taken to headquarters by the head poll worker at that location.
The above makes it basically impossible to cheat the machine at more than one or two locations without the entire election staff at headquarters being involved.
Observers can see who is casting the vote with any system. Every precinct has workers who observe people entering the booth no matter what system is being used. This is done to ensure that only registered voters who have properly signed in are allowed to vote.
No one is allowed to see how you vote, because by law we vote by "secret ballot". Only the fact you voted is recorded. Votes themselves are not linked to voters. This is done to prevent the buying of votes and/or the harrassing of voters to pressure them into voting a certain way.
All systems require the voter to leave their vote behind. A paper trail inside an electronic machine is no different than a paper ballot dropped into a box. Once you (the voter) leave the precinct, you have absolutely no idea wheather or not your ballot/vote is counted, rejected, lost or replaced. (The reason you are not allowed to take a copy with you is to prevent parties/candidates from buying votes.) All systems use electronic tabulation, and have for decades. Including the "hanging chad" punch-card systems. Your "two votes for Y" scenario can happen with any system. So focusing your distrust on one brand/system is really not very logical.
The truth is that every system out there is only as good/secure as the people running it. If you truly concerned about the integrity of the process, then volunteer and work a poll in your own county or help with the tabulation process in the main elections office on election night. Only the efforts of honest and concerned citizens will keep the process legit. Not the brand or style of voting equipment being used.
And that is when you object saying those votes are fraudulently which you can prove because you observed the whole process.
Whoozyerdaddy
Lifer
- Jun 27, 2005
- 19,216
- 1
- 61
First, I'm not aware of any stories about the machines getting hacked. You might want to provide a link to that. I have heard about how easy it would be to do...
It's not the individual voter in the booth that is going to cause the problems. The problem with the touch screen machine is:
1. There is no paper trail to follow up on. If the machine crashes or a recount is needed there is no paper trail.
2. There is no receipt confirming to the voter that their vote was tabulated correctly.
3. The flash card storing the data (here's where you get hacked... it's easier than writing code) can be replaced with a bogus card containing bogus election results. It's not a voter that is going to manipulate the data. It's going to be someone in charge of the machine itself.
Scanned paper ballots only please...
In all system you leave your vote behind but it isn't left in the voting both for a good reason.
Lets just use a paper trail inside the voting both for example. Lets say I wanted to invalidate all those votes. Well just hack the machine to start voting 1 million times randomly. No one will know which votes are valid and which are not because the attacker is the only on able to see the printers output. Or just steal the print out, or replace the print out.
Now compare that to a system where the votes are deposited in a public area. A user can't steal the ballot box because other voters will see that, A user can deposit millions of votes because a user will see that. The counting software can't cheat because when the mandatory random spot checking is done the counts will be different cause a mandatory recount of all the votes. There is not a single attack that an observer can't detect with a paper voting system.
sdifox
No Lifer
- Sep 30, 2005
- 100,726
- 18,035
- 126
I prefer the system we use up here in Toronto for municipal election. Ballot itself is a piece of cardboard. You got sections on the board for mayor, counselor and school trustee. In each section is the list of candidates, with incomplete arrows in front of their name. You use a magic marker to complete the arrow, indicating that is the candidate you are voting for.
Put that into a sleeve, obscuring your vote, take it over to the scanner, hand your vote over to the election official and this person then feeds the vote into the scanner. Scanner reports if the vote has been registered correctly, if so, paper ballot goes into a box as backup of the electronic result. IF not, rescan. It may not be the most up to date system, but it surely is effective and secure. And you have to provide proof you live in the district with ID that contain address, like driver's license, if you don't have your registration card.
Put that into a sleeve, obscuring your vote, take it over to the scanner, hand your vote over to the election official and this person then feeds the vote into the scanner. Scanner reports if the vote has been registered correctly, if so, paper ballot goes into a box as backup of the electronic result. IF not, rescan. It may not be the most up to date system, but it surely is effective and secure. And you have to provide proof you live in the district with ID that contain address, like driver's license, if you don't have your registration card.
- Mar 20, 2000
- 102,402
- 8,574
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no recount should be needed with a fully electronic machine. recounts were only needed because we knew the (paper) system didn't count votes properly. as for crashing, obviously there are electronic fixes for that.
i didn't have any way of knowing if my vote was tabulated correctly when i put it in the box using a piece of paper. at least with the electronic voting it shows me a confirmation screen giving me the name of everyone the machine thinks i voted for, which is much better than anything paper has come up with. heck, they could give me pictures of the candidates pretty easily, just to make sure.
paper has this problem as well.
that may be a good way to do it if you've got voting machines giving a confirmation, recording the vote, and then the voter takes the paper and puts it into another machine that scans it and offers another confirmation, then deposits it in a central place. then you'll have 3 counts.
but that only begs the question: what do we do if one count disagrees with the other two? or all 3 are disagree? paper is notoriously unsecure and inaccurate (which is part of the reason why we started using electronic to begin with). if paper disagrees with both machines, is it because paper is (historically) wrong? or did someone swap the memory modules in the machines?
First off, what you wrote is most likely not what anyone is saying, because no one in their right mind stands at the ballot box and the follows then box and verifies that every single form is counted. The current system already relies on blind faith. Even if they did follow the box, if one ballot is not counted, you have no way of knowing if it is yours unless you made some sort of special mark on your ballot and watched as they counted it.
Secondly, it is ridiculously easy to make a system where you can verify that the correct number of votes were counted. All you'd have to do is have some function where you can make a printout of the votes counted and then you can compare it to the voters who checked in list. Any B student in Comp Sci 101 could do that. In fact, I'd say it is significantly easier to verify with a proper electronic system than with a paper system.
Third, the concern with proof of voting is actually one relating to bribery, not mafia hit men. It would be fairly easy to prevent such a thing anyway by making it impossible to check your vote unless you do it in person, by yourself, with proper ID, at a voting facility.
Who's vote isn't counted doesn't matter.I wanted to be able to be sure that the final count is correct my indivudual vote is for all practical purposes is meaningless. Although I have no desire to watch the ballot box on election day, the fact that is in the open means I could which makes it harder to steal an election.
Yeah so now the count doesn't match what do you do then? Throw out all the votes, ignore it, thrrow out the last n number of votes?
So
Lifer
- Jul 2, 2001
- 25,923
- 17
- 81
Look up what Nevada did. Unlike Diebold, we have perfectly functional e-voting systems. Why? Because we have a resource waay more trustworthy with money than ATMs - the gaming control board. Basically, the same guys who validate that slot machines are legitimate helped decide on the system for electronic voting. We've had it as long as I've been a voter (so for the last 6 years) and it's been getting better and better. It's simple enough for the elderly not to be confused and it prints out a paper receipt for each ballot. Completely traceable and I haven't heard any allegations of the system being vulnerable or unreliable like diebold. It is one of the things I'm proudest of about our state's politics. We may have shady candidates, but at least I know my vote went through. 
Edit: article
Edit: article
- May 23, 2002
- 16,928
- 8
- 81
Originally posted by: So
Look up what Nevada did. Unlike Diebold, we have perfectly functional e-voting systems. Why? Because we have a resource waay more trustworthy with money than ATMs - the gaming control board. Basically, the same guys who validate that slot machines are legitimate helped decide on the system for electronic voting. We've had it as long as I've been a voter (so for the last 6 years) and it's been getting better and better. It's simple enough for the elderly not to be confused and it prints out a paper receipt for each ballot. Completely traceable and I haven't heard any allegations of the system being vulnerable or unreliable like diebold. It is one of the things I'm proudest of about our state's politics. We may have shady candidates, but at least I know my vote went through.
Edit: article
Do you have to put in a quarter to be able to vote?
Sounds like a good system to me. Roll it out to the rest of the country and stop hogging all the goodness for yourself.
Whoozyerdaddy
Lifer
- Jun 27, 2005
- 19,216
- 1
- 61
What is your objection to having a tangible piece of evience of your vote left over? That's where paper wins, hands down. Any system can be violated. Fraud can be induced in even the most secure voting environment. But what makes paper balloting superior is that in the end, there is still a physical remnant of your vote left. On the scale of manipulating millions of votes, how do you hide/destroy millions of ballots? That many paper ballots creates a bulky package that is far more difficult to make disappear than a card.
So
Lifer
- Jul 2, 2001
- 25,923
- 17
- 81
Originally posted by: Kelemvor
Originally posted by: So
Look up what Nevada did. Unlike Diebold, we have perfectly functional e-voting systems. Why? Because we have a resource waay more trustworthy with money than ATMs - the gaming control board. Basically, the same guys who validate that slot machines are legitimate helped decide on the system for electronic voting. We've had it as long as I've been a voter (so for the last 6 years) and it's been getting better and better. It's simple enough for the elderly not to be confused and it prints out a paper receipt for each ballot. Completely traceable and I haven't heard any allegations of the system being vulnerable or unreliable like diebold. It is one of the things I'm proudest of about our state's politics. We may have shady candidates, but at least I know my vote went through.
Edit: article
Do you have to put in a quarter to be able to vote?
Sounds like a good system to me. Roll it out to the rest of the country and stop hogging all the goodness for yourself.
I'm sure the company who manufactures them would be happy to, but it's all too easy for Diebold to lobby local politicians against the system approved by those vice ridden legalized gambling Nevadans...
So in order to verify that all votes are counted you would have to show up before the election began, check the floor beneath the box for any prestige-style trap doors, stand next to the box all day and make sure there is no tampering, then follow the box into the counting room and watch them count each and every ballot.
What do you do in the case of paper ballots? Say ten got blown away in a strong gust of wind. Or are you going to make some nonsense argument that it is impossible to lose paper ballots or have the count mismatch but not impossible to lose electronic votes because of some inherent flaw in all computers where every once in a while instead of a 0 or 1 a 2 shows up?
- Mar 20, 2000
- 102,402
- 8,574
- 126
going point by point: being able to copy election results to various locations as the votes happen, within the machine, within the polling place, and within the local district. or maybe the procedure i outlined.
and if you have a secure electronic system, the count is the count. what is the point of a recount? spend more money? again, the point of a recount is to ensure that the results were tallied properly to begin with as there is error in mechanical counting.
i don't trust manual verification. bug-eyed verifiers looking at scantrons under magnifying glass? please. and, of course, no one ever lost a ballot box on the way to the central office. how do i know that my piece of paper still exists?
just ask yourself: which is it easier to determine whether your vote was filled in correctly, a digital machine displaying the picture of the candidate with a confirmation screen at the end, or a mark on a piece of paper nestled in amongst many others?
you don't have to steal a million votes. generally a few hundred or few thousand will do. that's a precinct or two. and, as shown over and over again in our country's history, it isn't particularly hard to do.
i don't have an objection to a tangible piece of paper. i'm pointing out that paper is not the panacea that some think it is. it has a lot of problems, and the move to electronic voting was supposed to fix them. when it was shown that electronic voting may have some hypothetical problems (generally using old prototype machines) people suddenly want to ditch it and move to the sh!tty system we used to have, that was less secure and had failed us over and over?
and i'm of the opinion that there is far more voter fraud in the registration process than in the voting mechanism itself (though, obviously, if that is insecure it should be fixed).
and still, what do you do when the voting machine and the paper recount don't match? how about you do multiple counts of the paper ballots and none of them match? and if they do match, who's to say they weren't manipulated?
Props to SmackDown for keeping the common sense alive in this thread.
The only two advantages to electronic voting are cost and counting speed.
Counting can be easily done with scannable paper ballots. Speed will be just as good as pure electronic voting, but provide a verifiable record.
Cost will be higher with paper, but certainly the USA, a rich country that styles itself as a beacon of democracy, can afford it.
It's true there is no perfect system, but there are some very well tested ones. I find it sad the antics and questions that get raised in every US election of late. The very idea that lobbying from a company that makes these machines is considered as an election issue is deeply troubling.
The only two advantages to electronic voting are cost and counting speed.
Counting can be easily done with scannable paper ballots. Speed will be just as good as pure electronic voting, but provide a verifiable record.
Cost will be higher with paper, but certainly the USA, a rich country that styles itself as a beacon of democracy, can afford it.
It's true there is no perfect system, but there are some very well tested ones. I find it sad the antics and questions that get raised in every US election of late. The very idea that lobbying from a company that makes these machines is considered as an election issue is deeply troubling.
GeekDrew
Diamond Member
- Jun 7, 2000
- 9,099
- 19
- 81
I personally prefer touchscreen voting, when configured correctly, over optical scan -- because it's more accurate. You wouldn't believe the number of people that can't properly vote an optical scan ballot. For example, *many* people in my county, in the November 2006 Election, voted for multiple candidates for Governor. Many others filled in the circle for those that they wanted to vote for, and put an 'X' through the ones that they didn't. More yet put check marks in the boxes for which they wanted to vote, and an 'X' through those that they didn't. And then there are those that only cross out the ones that they didn't want to vote for, and leave the ones that they wanted to select blank. How are you supposed to account for all of those possibilities on optical scan ballots without manual intervention? On DREs, it's automated -- they aren't permitted to screw up in any manner such as the above examples. There is a margin of error when scanning optical ballots, whereas there is not, with DRE.
The way that many jurisdictions "prove" that ballots were counted properly is compare the voter signature list, the poll worker's voted voters list, and the cast ballots summary. They should all equal; if they do not, the discrepancy must be investigated. Of course, there are *many* reasons for discrepancies... the number one reason being that people come in, are issued a ballot, and the voter never casts the ballot.
You can also see the machine totals, which should always equal 0, at the beginning of the day. At the close of polls, the number of voters that have voted (which is recorded on two independent lists -- one by a poll worker, another by the requirement of the voter signing the voter signature list) should equal the number of votes on all machines in that given precinct. The voter has the ability to view their paper ballot on the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail ("VVPAT"). Many people argue that they can see their ballot, but they can't see the machine cast X votes for another candidate, after they walk away. The way we can prove that it didn't is by comparing the number of voters voting in the election to the number of ballots cast.
I personally have *much* more confidence in DRE voting terminals than paper ballots -- paper ballots are far more easy to compromise.
Originally posted by: So
Originally posted by: Kelemvor
Originally posted by: So
Look up what Nevada did. Unlike Diebold, we have perfectly functional e-voting systems. Why? Because we have a resource waay more trustworthy with money than ATMs - the gaming control board. Basically, the same guys who validate that slot machines are legitimate helped decide on the system for electronic voting. We've had it as long as I've been a voter (so for the last 6 years) and it's been getting better and better. It's simple enough for the elderly not to be confused and it prints out a paper receipt for each ballot. Completely traceable and I haven't heard any allegations of the system being vulnerable or unreliable like diebold. It is one of the things I'm proudest of about our state's politics. We may have shady candidates, but at least I know my vote went through.
Edit: article
Do you have to put in a quarter to be able to vote?
Sounds like a good system to me. Roll it out to the rest of the country and stop hogging all the goodness for yourself.
I'm sure the company who manufactures them would be happy to, but it's all too easy for Diebold to lobby local politicians against the system approved by those vice ridden legalized gambling Nevadans...
What makes those machines any better than DREs from Diebold or ES&S? That article just mentions VVPATs... which both Diebold and ES&S have available. All DRE voting machines in Ohio are equipped with a VVPAT.
VVPATs are just as good.
You'd think that, wouldn't you? Apparently someone didn't send that memo to most county commissioners in Ohio, which are protesting the rising cost of elections.
Please explain to me how I can see the state of a computer? I can't read the bits in flash memory with just my eyes maybe you can but I can't. Maybe you mean I can ask the computer if it is at zero, but the reply is only valid if I trust the computer. Yes you can compare the final vote tally with the number of voters but that can only detect fraud and can't prevent it with a paper system the observers could stop anyone trying to stuff a ballot box. Detecting fraud is worthless because you can't remove the invalid votes.
Ok, is it THAT hard?
Microsoft's Windows Activation has not been cracked yet. Even if you read all those ways to get AROUND activation, you can't actually activate yet with those illegitemate keys.
So if you can't successfully activate a pirated version, why can't you have a similar process for a vote? Quite simple huh?
Microsoft's Windows Activation has not been cracked yet. Even if you read all those ways to get AROUND activation, you can't actually activate yet with those illegitemate keys.
So if you can't successfully activate a pirated version, why can't you have a similar process for a vote? Quite simple huh?
GeekDrew
Diamond Member
- Jun 7, 2000
- 9,099
- 19
- 81
By "seeing the machine totals", I meant on the opening report that is printed on the VVPAT, and verified by the poll workers, when polls open.
I agree that detecting fraud isn't an ideal solution, given that you can't remove invalid votes. I seriously doubt that DRE will ever disappear, though, at least in its entirety.
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