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Marian Beddill
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Uu7thprinciple
Post Number: 98
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 3 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, October 26, 2007 - 10:28 pm: | 
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Why I worry about computerized voting.
People who write (and certify) programs for computers can make mistakes. Such mistakes can make the results come out wrong. Wrong results can change the outcome of elections. That's about as simple as I can make it.
Some mistakes end up being - ho-hum kinds of things, and the situation can be fixed - either a temporary workaround or a permanent correction. But others may be worse, might not be easily patched up, and may make a difference in the election outcome - an intolerable result. Worse yet, they might make changes in the outcome that do not get caught - or not caught until "too late".
Here is a current, real case, of such a computer program mistake, in my own county.
We use vote-by-mail. Ballots are printed and mailed to voters. Voters mark them and mail the ballot back (or drop it in a designated collection-box.) The county is geographically divided two different ways - by precincts and by special taxing-districts, like school, fire, cemetery and parks districts. Their boundaries don't coincide, so many precincts have sub-sections commonly called "splits". Voters in one split can vote on some offices and measures, voters in other splits, cannot.
Our new (3 years old) computerized elections system has multiple programs for the many different functions. And those programs must interact with each other, and must do so flawlessly. If they do not correctly interact, blam! Even more troubling, they (and the fundamental "operating system" of the computer) are made by different companies, so the coordination is tricky or worse.
This year, one of the companies changed their program. The company who made it either didn't know about, or didn't adequately check, how it interacted with another program. The result - a failure. And yet the changed program (we are told) was passed - approved and certified by the Federal certification process and the State certification process. Why was the error not caught there? Duhhhh!
So, as our county was preparing the ballot-images for our OpScan ballots to be sent to the printer, two of the programs goofed in interacting, and the computer output had errors. The program which was changed had a new identification way of registering the precinct-split number, but the other program that received that data did not know the new field identification.
The outcome of that goofed merger? The information was ignored, and the ballots were printed without the split identification - 9,211 of them (almost 10% of the county's ~100,000 registered voters) and mailed to the voters, sans the computerized bar-coded split ID's.
Only when the next step was being done, setting up the ballot-reading program, did a third program squawk - because it saw that those ID's were missing. Aw, shucks. It took the staff several days to trace the problem, and to craft a solution.
Maybe that will get fixed well enough for this election, already running. And surely well enough for the next election - until the next mistake appears.
How did Whatcom's computerized ballots get messed up. Here's what I have been told (the first and last steps in this chain.) I am surmising the middle steps:
Our computerized election system got messed up because one programmer at the manufacturer changed one variable-definition in one program, and nobody caught the effect.
Not him, not his boss, not the vendor, not the Federal Elections Board, not the Federal Software Certifier, not the State Software Certifier, not the local operator. Every "preventative" test failed. Nobody knew it was wrong, and ballots were printed and delivered. Nobody knew it was wrong until the next step blew up in the face of the local staff, trying to use them.
This might end up making big news, because it is the live, classic example of why I cannot trust computer-only election systems. There can be any number of such errors at any number of places in the system.
This is the main reason I do not have a high degree of confidence in computerized voting and vote-counting. The potential - nay, certainty - of errors is too high to engender the degree of confidence needed, thus the trust that the public must have, in the use of elections as the way to let the people control the government.
The opposite is intolerable, and the founders of our nation knew that, and wrote it into the Constitution of the United States.
Maybe we can continue to use computers in our elections systems, but ONLY with a parallel auditing program that can be independently verified totally separate from the basic system. And since I reject the use of yet other computers to do this, the only such process which I know to check the accuracy and integrity of the vote-counting is by hand and eye. This is why I strongly support the standard use, everywhere and always, of a program of hand-counted double-checking of the ballots and vote-counting.
Because: "If you cannot trust the way your votes are counted, nothing much else in politics matters!" And we do want politics to matter; the alternative is not democracy.
Marian
http://NoLeakyBuckets.org
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Sharon M. Foster
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Smfoster
Post Number: 108
Registered: 02-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, October 27, 2007 - 5:27 am: |
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Well said, Marian! The interfaces between systems, and the fact that more than one subsystem may be involved in any e-voting scheme, is not a topic that has been discussed much in this forum recently. The fact that changing one variable, or one field, can impact another subsystem is not a mystery to people who develop mission- or safety-critical software. For one thing, in those environments you can't change a single line of code without jumping through a whole lot of hoops. For another thing, the interfaces between subsystems are very well-defined. Several layers of review and then testing catch most (but not all!) errors of this kind. Unfortunately sometimes the customer ends up being the beta tester, which is what happened here.
But that's only the error that got caught. What about the errors that didn't get caught, even in beta test? |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 1556
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, October 29, 2007 - 3:37 am: |
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Was your title of One Prigramming Error intentional? If not, vastly ironic. |
Marian Beddill
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Uu7thprinciple
Post Number: 99
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, October 29, 2007 - 7:08 am: |
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I don't think I need to say, Brant, whether that spelling that's different from the expected, was intentional on my part; intentional on the part of the programmer who created any one of the programs which had to be used to compose and send my keyboard character strokes through several systems into this webpage; accidental on the part of one of the prigrammers; or intention on somebody's part.
Important is that the result is not what you, the reader, expected that the process would have as observable output.
Marian
http://NoLeakyBuckets.org
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Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 1559
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, October 29, 2007 - 8:39 am: |
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It would have been funnier if you actually hadn't mis-spelled it in the current message, Marian. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 4136
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, October 29, 2007 - 9:44 am: |
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I didn't notice it till you pointed it out. That also makes an important point. |
Marian Beddill
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Uu7thprinciple
Post Number: 100
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, October 29, 2007 - 1:13 pm: |
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One more step in this process happened today. The "Canvassing Board" met to approve the special procedures to be used in handling and processing these ballots.
They approved the procedures, after some discussion and amendments to the first (public) draft. (The "Canvassing Board" is composed of the Elections Official, an elected County Council member, and the Prosecuting Attorney - or a representative of each. Their main role is to Certify the final results of any election.)
Since each ballot was created with the Precinct number and the identification of the "split" (called "STYLE") printed on the ballot in plain text, a new processing station was added to have staff hand-mark the missing line on the bar-code area of each of those ballots, thus making them machine-readable.
A green ballpoint pen will be standard for adding these marks. And our corps of Observers may attend and watch all these steps - thus providing some citizen oversight of the process. Voter secrecy is preserved, since ballots have no markings to identify individual voters, just "where" they live (by area, not by house.) There are other details of how this will work, but that's the essence.
It looks like they will manage to get through this snag, this time.
But any bets what the next big computer-voting error somewhere will be?
And, go ask your local elections office what their processes are for computer failures in their election system.
Marian
http://NoLeakyBuckets.org
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Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 4137
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, October 29, 2007 - 1:45 pm: |
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quote:And, go ask your local elections office what their processes are for computer failures in their election system.
That is a GREAT suggestion! |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 6950
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, October 29, 2007 - 5:07 pm: |
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Another great suggestion, and a valuable thread, Marian. |
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