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Wednesday, November 03, 2004

All the News That's Printed...
...fits under the category of election news this morning. Even the tech stuff, where CNN is covering the study of the brain as a political tool. (Didn't we do that here a few days ago?) Let me step out on a limb. (Nothing dangerous. It's my leg.)

The Tech Debacle of 2004 is going to be the failure of states to adopt a significantly advanced voting solution (i.e., the application of technology) to prevent the delays in vote counting in states like New Mexico, and the overall problem of voter fraud (either direct or indirect) There's really no reason for shying away from electronic voting machines (we'll leave e-voting for a time when browsers and SSLs are more secure than they are now). We already use ATM machines. When we go to the supermarket, we routinely swipe our credit or debit cards to pay the bill, and, my God, just think of EZ-Pass! The one thing this year should teach us is that technophobia is no longer an option. The postulate to that theorem is that technology needs to be used in an intelligent manner, not just as blanket thrown over the problem to hide it.

# Permalink Posted at 7:22 AM 5 comments Email this Link

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Sure we use ATMs and credit card machines because those things are based on tested and true hardware and the companies involved stand to lose lots of money over even the smallest mistake...

But with electronic voting boxes we have upstart companies building software based on ACCESS of all things!!!! The companies have nothing to lose if a few votes here and there get lost. (we are having trouble nailing Enron chiefs for theft, we'd never get Diebold chiefs for electoral theft).

We should just co-opt ATM machines and use them instead. Banks lose less than $1 in a billion transactions. Just line them up in the school gym and issue the people special voting ATM cards :-)

Well, its a thought at least

# posted by Anonymous 9:45 AM

.... except the companies making voting machines aren't upstarts. Take a look what Diebold makes, for example:

http://www.diebold.com/

What kills me is, they couldn't figure out they needed a paper trail in a voting machine, yet all the ATMs they make are required to have them. THAT just doesn't make sense....

But as Bill says, no reason to write off the category. Just come up with requirements for e-voting machines that meet the same level of security as ATMs and electronic gambling machines.

# posted by Anonymous 10:17 AM

Sunpass!

# posted by Terry 9:59 PM

There are some fundamental differences between electronic voting machines and devices like ATMs and E-Z Pass. The most obvious is the ability to verify, after the fact, that the transaction was as you believed it to be.

I don't know about you, but I get a statement from my bank every month detailing my ATM transactions. Likewise, E-Z Pass. If something goes wrong I can detect it.

With many of these voting machines there is no way to detect error. Did your vote get counted? There's no way to tell. Did your vote get counted the way intended? Again, no way to tell.

There are a lot of things to like about electronic voting, but verifiability isn't one of them and verifiability is paramount in an election.

Thse devices need some kind of paper trail. Myself, I think that we would be well-served by using a combination of printing terminal and optical reader. The voting machine would be an input device that produces a paper ballot filled out as intended by the voter. This gets fed into a more or less typical optical scanner device.

This allows the ability to leverage the major advantages of electronic voting (eg language independence, under- and overvote detection) while still maintaining the ability of the voter to verify that the vote is correct. Moreover, the error rate of the optical scanner can approach zero because the printout can contain choices encoded as bar codes, including checksum information.

The most important win here is that we no longer rely on the integrity of the software. If it does the wrong thing we can detect it on the spot and it's trivial to perform a manual recount.

jim

# posted by Jim Frost 7:06 AM

Bruce Schneier (http://www.schneier.com/) has plenty to say about voting machines and e-voting. The difference to ATM's is that a bank employee has relatively little to gain by messing with your ATM, and is likely to get caught due to the audit trail.

A voting machine employee has a lot to gain by messing with the vote (there's a lot of money riding on the result - industrial or political lobbies, or foreign governments, or criminal organisations can produce big bribes) and is hard to catch, because there's no way to tell whether the count was correct.

As for e-voting, I thought an eminent group of scientists recently said that barring fundamental advances in science, e-voting cannot be secured - it's not just a matter of minor browser hardening. Example - how do you prevent a DDOS attack on the voting servers? How do you convince people that nobody hacked into the systems and changed the result, in the face of malicious hoaxers claiming to have done so?

# posted by Anonymous 8:48 AM

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