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"WATCH LIST"
Marked with: 
"OPEN & HONEST"
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| (US) 11/06 - Change the LAW! |
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| Author |
Message |
    
Alicia C Simpson
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Aliciacarla
Post Number: 1
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - 10:03 am: | 
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<p>Most of what I see being done is 'after the fact' corrections or adjustments. What we need to be is proactive and change the law to stop this sort of thing.</p>
<ul>
<p>1.) The hardware manufacturers and the software publishers for voting systems should be independent companies. No one company should be allowed to produce both. This will make it harder for any fraud as it will require collusion between two or more companies.<br>This will also provide more competition in the marketplace and reduce costs.</p>
<p>2.) The full technical specifications for hardware used in ALL voting systems must be published.</p>
<p>3.) The source code for ALL software used in voting systems must be made public. The binaries must also be available so the public can disassemble them and compare the result to the published source code.</p>
<p>4.) ALL voting equipment must provide a paper trail that can be inspected by the voter before he or she leaves the voting booth.</p>
<p>5.) Both criminal as well as civil penalties must apply to persons who violate patents and copyrights of voting systems (this is to offset the publishing requirements).</p>
</ul>
This is not a complete solution, keeping on top of things will still be needed, but these laws will make if far more difficult for anyone to tamper with results and improve voter confidence. |
Jt Gleason
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Entropyfails
Post Number: 12
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - 12:08 pm: |
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This is not a complete solution, keeping on top of things will still be needed, but these laws will make if far more difficult for anyone to tamper with results and improve voter confidence.
No they won't. See my post on why computers can never count the vote.
I like open systems as much as anyone else. But the only "open system" that works is hand marking and hand counting the ballots. This always will be true due to how computers work. I'm beginning to see why so little progress has been made in this field.
It isn't your fault that you were educated incorrectly. But it is time for you to learn a bit about computer science before you posit solutions that can never work. |
Ami Silberman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Jol
Post Number: 138
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - 8:19 am: |
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JT,
I respectfully disagree. I understand the diagonalization argument you use for why no computer voting system can be provably fair, and why this extends to any finite set of such systems. However, in the real world diagonalization arguments are often irrelevant in practice since they rely on very small probabilities. What would be the problem with the following system consisting of three types of components – vote markers, vote counters, and vote tabulators.
There is a single vote marker which fills in a human readable (understandable) optical scan ballot. The vote marker can also check for overvotes (and possibly undervotes) and alert the voter. The voter can verify whether the ballot is filled in correctly, and then physically puts the ballot into a ballot box. (The reason for this step is to eliminate, or greatly reduce, the number of ballots which are ambiguous, contain over votes etc.) We could dispense with this step and have the voter fill in the ballot with a #2 pencil.
Vote counters scan the ballots and tally the results. Since the structure of the ballot is fixed, we can use multiple different counters, running different software, developed by different vendors, and political parties, watch dog groups etc. can all run their own. If there is a discrepancy between various vote counters it can be resolved via a handcount of the ballots. (Or perhaps the counter needs to be re-calibrated.) In any event, to suborn the election at this stage would require means of suborning multiple systems, and causing them to produce the same incorrect values. (The reason for using a computerized vote marker is to eliminate, or at least seriously reduce, the chance of a ballot being counted incorrectly due to scanner calibration.)
The third component is vote tabulation. Again, multiple tabulators can be used, including human beings operating calculators or hand calculation. There could be multiple means of getting the data from the scanners to the tabulators.
After the initial computer tabulation, there can be hand recounts if the totals are close.
Yes, it is conceivable that all of the counters could be hacked/compromised, but I think that it is very unlikely that this would occur. I think that the easiest point of attack of the above system regards custody of the ballots, which is also the easiest election-day point of attack on a purely manual system. By combining the ability to use machine counting at the precinct (in fact, even during the voting) with hand-counting, I think we can make both systems more robust.
Comments? |
Jt Gleason
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Entropyfails
Post Number: 44
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - 8:50 am: |
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I think that it is very unlikely that this would occur.
I think if voting fraud is possible then it is inevitable.
All you need to do to fix it is to assert the primacy of hand counting the vote.
Our current systems are just fine, as long as we go back to hand counting the vote. Trusting a computer can work in a mutually adversarial system like a bank transfer where anonymity does not exist. In an anonymous system, you can never trust anything.
We can have the machine help. The vote counts will be put on the news at about the same time as they are now. However, the news will have to say that these are "provisional results dependent on the final hand count."
Also, we don't have all these redundant voting check systems currently, even with our expensive elections, why would we get them in the future? *grin* |
Ami Silberman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Jol
Post Number: 147
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, November 9, 2006 - 7:53 am: |
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I aggree with you that "if voting fraud is possible then it is inevitable", but I think that having multiple independent means of checking the vote totals moves the fraud threat back to "small-scale" low-level frauds. I don't aggree that every fraud vector that is possible is inevitable. Having multiple, independent vote tabulators means that anyone wanting to create a fraud at that level would have to corrupt a majority of them to produce exactly the same results. From a theoretical point of view, you are forcing the would-be fraudsters to ensure that the majority of the systems produce identical Byzantine faults.
I still your suggestion above about "provisional results", but with the caveat that the provisional results, if obtained by a rebust, fault-resistant system of systems, can be used to detect at least some potential fraud in the hand-count. (In particular, missing ballots etc.) |
Craig Bergren
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Babyhuey
Post Number: 17
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, November 9, 2006 - 2:03 pm: |
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Ami,
You are on the right track. I also think that with time automated systems using standards like you suggest will become much more accurate and perhaps even more fraud resistent.
I've gone to an automated teller at my bank much more often than I have a human teller. I've never received a miscount from the ATM. The human on the other hand has a spotted record.
Craig |
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