Posted on 01/26/2007 3:03:07 AM PST by lifelong_republican
But they have thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people counting. Which makes it likely somebody will bribe people to volunteer as counters and cheat. Video won't help that, there's too many different counters to keep track of and someone could doctor it.
So I'm proposing we have 5 people. TOTAL. 5 trusted people, to count all the ballots. For a presidential election, that's 120 million ballots, if a counter can do 1 a second, that's 3.8 years (because each counter has to look at all the ballots.
Sure, if you want to get more counters, you could do that quicker, but every time you bring more people into the process, you make it more likely that George Soros can bribe enough counters to throw the election.
BTW, remember that those same 120 million voters also voted for a dozen other elections, all of which have to be counted.
Last thing, and I'm done. As you may know, there are two small towns in New Hampshire that have town meetings to cast their presidential ballots, they vote on paper, and they count the votes right at midnight. So they are the first to report.
In 2004, here is the newspaper report of their vote:
HART’S LOCATION, N.H. - The nation’s first Election Day votes were cast and counted just after midnight Tuesday in this mountain hamlet, with President Bush and John Kerry each receiving 15 votes. Ralph Nader received one.
HERE is their official results:
Bush-16, Kerry-14, Nader-1.
Turns out they miscounted the ballots, and only caught the error the next day.
When a town can't manually count 31 ballots without making a mistake, what chance is there that you could count 120 million ballots and get a better result than we get with flawed electronic equipment?
Would you ever count a million pennies by hand?
I agree with Mr. Schneier completely on how electronic voting machines should work.
In the aftermath of the U.S.’s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we'll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.
The U.S has been here before. After 2000, voting machine problems made international headlines. The government appropriated money to fix the problems nationwide. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines -- although presented as the solution -- have largely made the problem worse. This doesn’t mean that these machines should be abandoned, but they need to be designed to increase both their accuracy, and peoples’ trust in their accuracy. This is difficult, but not impossible.
Before I can discuss electronic voting machines, I need to explain why voting is so difficult. Basically, a voting system has four required characteristics:
Through the centuries, different technologies have done their best. Stones and pot shards dropped in Greek vases gave way to paper ballots dropped in sealed boxes. Mechanical voting booths, punch cards, and then optical scan machines replaced hand-counted ballots. New computerized voting machines promise even more efficiency, and Internet voting even more convenience.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed. And to reiterate: accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted by, for example, a punch-card reader. It’s not how the tabulating machine deals with hanging chads, pregnant chads, or anything like that. Accuracy is how well the process translates voter intent into properly counted votes.
Technologies get in the way of accuracy by adding steps. Each additional step means more potential errors, simply because no technology is perfect. Consider an optical-scan voting system. The voter fills in ovals on a piece of paper, which is fed into an optical-scan reader. The reader senses the filled-in ovals and tabulates the votes. This system has several steps: voter to ballot to ovals to optical reader to vote tabulator to centralized total.
At each step, errors can occur. If the ballot is confusing, then some voters will fill in the wrong ovals. If a voter doesn’t fill them in properly, or if the reader is malfunctioning, then the sensor won’t sense the ovals properly. Mistakes in tabulation -- either in the machine or when machine totals get aggregated into larger totals -- also cause errors. A manual system -- tallying the ballots by hand, and then doing it again to double-check -- is more accurate simply because there are fewer steps.
The error rates in modern systems can be significant. Some voting technologies have a 5% error rate: one in twenty people who vote using the system don’t have their votes counted properly. This system works anyway because most of the time errors don’t matter. If you assume that the errors are uniformly distributed -- in other words, that they affect each candidate with equal probability -- then they won’t affect the final outcome except in very close races. So we’re willing to sacrifice accuracy to get a voting system that will more quickly handle large and complicated elections. In close races, errors can affect the outcome, and that’s the point of a recount. A recount is an alternate system of tabulating votes: one that is slower (because it’s manual), simpler (because it just focuses on one race), and therefore more accurate.
Note that this is only true if everyone votes using the same machines. If parts of town that tend to support candidate A use a voting system with a higher error rate than the voting system used in parts of town that tend to support candidate B, then the results will be skewed against candidate A. This is an important consideration in voting accuracy, although tangential to the topic of this essay.
With this background, the issue of computerized voting machines becomes clear. Actually, “computerized voting machines” is a bad choice of words. Many of today’s voting technologies involve computers. Computers tabulate both punch-card and optical-scan machines. The current debate centers around all-computer voting systems, primarily touch-screen systems, called Direct Record Electronic (DRE) machines. (The voting system used in India’s most recent election -- a computer with a series of buttons -- is subject to the same issues.) In these systems the voter is presented with a list of choices on a screen, perhaps multiple screens if there are multiple elections, and he indicates his choice by touching the screen. These machines are easy to use, produce final tallies immediately after the polls close, and can handle very complicated elections. They also can display instructions in different languages and allow for the blind or otherwise handicapped to vote without assistance.
They’re also more error-prone. The very same software that makes touch-screen voting systems so friendly also makes them inaccurate. And even worse, they’re inaccurate in precisely the worst possible way.
Bugs in software are commonplace, as any computer user knows. Computer programs regularly malfunction, sometimes in surprising and subtle ways. This is true for all software, including the software in computerized voting machines. For example:
In Fairfax County, VA, in 2003, a programming error in the electronic voting machines caused them to mysteriously subtract 100 votes from one particular candidates’ totals.
In San Bernardino County, CA in 2001, a programming error caused the computer to look for votes in the wrong portion of the ballot in 33 local elections, which meant that no votes registered on those ballots for that election. A recount was done by hand.
In Volusia County, FL in 2000, an electronic voting machine gave Al Gore a final vote count of negative 16,022 votes.
The 2003 election in Boone County, IA, had the electronic vote-counting equipment showing that more than 140,000 votes had been cast in the Nov. 4 municipal elections. The county has only 50,000 residents and less than half of them were eligible to vote in this election.
There are literally hundreds of similar stories.
What’s important about these problems is not that they resulted in a less accurate tally, but that the errors were not uniformly distributed; they affected one candidate more than the other. This means that you can’t assume that errors will cancel each other out and not affect the election; you have to assume that any error will skew the results significantly.
Another issue is that software can be hacked. That is, someone can deliberately introduce an error that modifies the result in favor of his preferred candidate. This has nothing to do with whether the voting machines are hooked up to the Internet on election day. The threat is that the computer code could be modified while it is being developed and tested, either by one of the programmers or a hacker who gains access to the voting machine company’s network. It’s much easier to surreptitiously modify a software system than a hardware system, and it’s much easier to make these modifications undetectable.
A third issue is that these problems can have further-reaching effects in software. A problem with a manual machine just affects that machine. A software problem, whether accidental or intentional, can affect many thousands of machines -- and skew the results of an entire election.
Some have argued in favor of touch-screen voting systems, citing the millions of dollars that are handled every day by ATMs and other computerized financial systems. That argument ignores another vital characteristic of voting systems: anonymity. Computerized financial systems get most of their security from audit. If a problem is suspected, auditors can go back through the records of the system and figure out what happened. And if the problem turns out to be real, the transaction can be unwound and fixed. Because elections are anonymous, that kind of security just isn’t possible.
None of this means that we should abandon touch-screen voting; the benefits of DRE machines are too great to throw away. But it does mean that we need to recognize its limitations, and design systems that can be accurate despite them.
Computer security experts are unanimous on what to do. (Some voting experts disagree, but I think we’re all much better off listening to the computer security experts. The problems here are with the computer, not with the fact that the computer is being used in a voting application.) And they have two recommendations:
Computerized systems with these characteristics won’t be perfect -- no piece of software is -- but they’ll be much better than what we have now. We need to start treating voting software like we treat any other high-reliability system. The auditing that is conducted on slot machine software in the U.S. is significantly more meticulous than what is done to voting software. The development process for mission-critical airplane software makes voting software look like a slapdash affair. If we care about the integrity of our elections, this has to change.
Proponents of DREs often point to successful elections as “proof” that the systems work. That completely misses the point. The fear is that errors in the software -- either accidental or deliberately introduced -- can undetectably alter the final tallies. An election without any detected problems is no more a proof the system is reliable and secure than a night that no one broke into your house is proof that your door locks work. Maybe no one tried, or maybe someone tried and succeeded...and you don’t know it.
Even if we get the technology right, we still won’t be done. If the goal of a voting system is to accurately translate voter intent into a final tally, the voting machine is only one part of the overall system. In the 2004 U.S. election, problems with voter registration, untrained poll workers, ballot design, and procedures for handling problems resulted in far more votes not being counted than problems with the technology. But if we’re going to spend money on new voting technology, it makes sense to spend it on technology that makes the problem easier instead of harder.
That's my point. The paper ballot that is reviewed by the voter is the ballot that is counted. Not some phantom electronic record. In addition that paper ballot can be produced in such a way that it is both easy for the voter to review and for a machine to read for the official vote tally and recount if required.
The electronic record could be used as a cross check against the official paper ballot count to see if a recount might be warranted. But the paper ballot remains the primary official record which has been verified by the voter at the time he or she voted.
The electronics make it much easier for the corrupt Democrats to rig elections and get away with it.
A lot of seniors don't normally use computers and shouldn't be forced to do it to vote, especially when the computers are so unreliable.
It's far easier to secure physical ballots than electronics, and it's beneficial to Americans to give them added incentives to participate in the vote-counting process. The physical ballots allow for audits and recounts where the electronics do not.
Thanks for your descriptions. Those seem to be the same lever machines formerly used in PA, too.
There are probably now electronics in that polling place.
Thank you so much for your excellent reference!
Your comments are interesting. The 'voting' systems use wireless and other internet connections, and I agree with you that they shouldn't.
The unreliability and vulnerability problems exist even before the connectivity is considered.
Voter ID doesn't matter at all, now, since the electronics can be manipulated even if all the voters are identified correctly, though.
Diebold says that a seal would have to be broken after the machine was opened with the master key. But why bother with a key at all then, why not just the seal?
Of course a machine turning up with a broken seal would invalidate all the votes it took, suggesting a means of sabotaging votes if not garnering fraudulent votes.
Thank you. You make an excellent point. There is no way to show that evidence of tampering didn't result in tampering.
Unquestionably!
They don't leave "hanging chads" when punching through a stack of a hundred punch cards.
Any time. Mr. Schneier wrote the book "Applied Cryptography", which is the bible for folks who are looking for a start in anything crypto-related. I respect his opinion on security, especially where it concerns computers a lot.
Those who point out the flaws in the electronic 'voting' systems are anything but afraid of the technology.
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