Schwarzenegger Gets First Hand Lesson In E-Voting Problems
from the well-that-was-useful dept
It's been a while since we've had any e-voting stories, but with Tuesday's special election in California, you had to know something would turn up. While the state of California had talked about banning all e-voting machines until they were proven to be secure and possessed a verifiable paper trail, it appears they're still in use. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger learned a bit about the issue directly when he went to vote, and the machine told him he'd already voted. Turns out that in "testing" the machine last month, a voting official put in the Governor's name as a test, and so the machine assumed he had voted. Of course, given his position, he was able to get it sorted out, but you have to imagine that others might not have been so lucky. It also makes you wonder if the machines were still counting the same tallies from whatever this "test" was last month.
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E-voting
However, I am more concerned with the fact that if his name was listed as 'already voted' are there any cast votes that were from testing that stayed with the name alone. The mere fact that no one checked to see if the system was purged prior to live voting reaffirms my belief in state workers and also causes me *great* concern.
Less concerning was how does the system identify who already voted? It cant be simply by name, that would be far too easy to spoof, also what about the 50 John Smiths in a given district? So there must be more data, data which was accurately used for the test. Authentication information should be more than what is available from a page out of the phone book, although I fear given that the state put its best minds on this that it wasnt...
Personally I have no problems with e-voting machines provided they do little more than reciept printing. You select the various different things you want to vote for, when you are finished you press 'print' and out pops a paper ballot with a machine readable *and* human readable information on what you voted for. That way it can be verified by the voter before stuffing in a ballot box. If it comes down to a handcount the human readable information can be used to verify results. This should remove all concerns that everyone has with the system, reduce failure rates with the reader systems (see florida for dangling chad issues) and generally make the voting experience better.
But no one wants to make such a simple system, instead they want a network enabled black box that leaves no trail. While that may ultimately not be the worst thing, let the best geek win, in the short term I think that it will just cause more problems.
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Re: E-voting
I agree with your receipt idea all the way. I would even like to see the source code and data tables for this system.
I just voted in Virginia via e-vote and it does come up with a confirmation screen at the end identifying your choice, but this is one case where I would like to have a paper receipt with time stamp on it.
The thought that CA's system still had test data in it amazes me to an extent, but then again the criteria for government systems seem to be a bit different from that of corporate systems.
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Re: E-voting
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Re: E-voting
Same here, but I didn't vote absentee-- they were nice enough to give you a paper ballot upon request...
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No Subject Given
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vote
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No Subject Given
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No Subject Given
Are we sure these were put together by sane people?
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This is a incredible mess!!
Have anybody there??? Anybody with, at least, two neuronious?????
They make test at the same data behaviour of the real world??? They never had heard about "training" or "test" behaviour??
What a big mess. And, please it's not a tech problem, be honest this is a low intelectual issue!!! Do not exist computer system able to solve it!!!
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an achilles heel
I get somewhat of a warm fuzzy feeling when I see election officials carting away boxes of ballots from poll sites on TV. Obviously, paper ballots can be stuffed, but at least that can't be done from a laptop in an out of state hotel room ... you've got to have lots of people on the ground doing the dirty work.
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Looks like those Testers "voted" Democrat
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Ban E-Voting
Democracy is worth waiting for counting and exit polls give us an idea of what happened well before that.
The exit polls are proven, except interestingly enough when mr. bush runs. The latter says more than anything else. The UN Actually uses exit polls to monitor elections. Only in america are people dumb enough to think that a new and vulnerable technology (e-voting) is more reliable than something which is proven over DECADES. In any case, We can wait a day and we can use machine like we have here in NY State which have never had hanging chads, etc.
Democracy is worth it. Ban them E-voting machines. By the way before someone starts calling me a lefty or something else let me make clear that i support the libertarian and constitution parties. I consider integrity of voting rather important and not a partisan issue.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
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Duh!
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Re: Duh!
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