Forget Fixing E-Voting Machines; Why Not Just Jump All The Way To Internet Voting?
from the slow-down,-skippy dept
Just as we've been hearing more and more stories about e-voting glitches that should have everyone wondering whether we're really ready to automate elections in this manner, one company in the space is pushing in the other direction. VoteHere, one of the biggest lobbyists in support of laws that required e-voting machines, is saying we should jump right on over to internet voting. The company's founder actually can stand up and say "the technology is done" with a straight face. Considering the myriad problems with e-voting machines already (and the unwillingness of any firm to admit to the problems with e-voting) it would seem like perhaps we need a little more proof about the safety, security and accuracy of internet voting before we just accept the word of a company in the space. They point to some "small scale" tests as proof that the system works, claiming that hackers tried and failed to impact those elections. Of course, once again, there's no way to know if that's true, or if the hackers were just good enough to hide their trail. More importantly, the difference between a small scale election and a large scale, national, Presidential election is one of huge orders of magnitude in both users and importance. Hopefully the debate over problems in e-voting have enough attention that politicians won't blindly rush to an equally questionable solution -- but we're not holding our breath here.
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Ha!
Haha! Good one...
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Tech?
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Re: Tech?
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Red flag warning.
Gee, no red flags there, huh?
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Random recounts can solve a lot of problems. And don't automate the higher up and more significant process of combining the tally from different voting districts if we need more security. You'll still save a ton of time and money and errors on the low-level vote counting. This applies to both internet voting or machine voting.
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Uhh..
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Re: Uhh..
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Internet Voting
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oh no...
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I want to see the Roman system brought back, violence and beatings at the polls and all.
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Give me a person!
Part of the electoral system is that it is humans voting for humans ... having real human beings involved increases the cost and time, but it also means that serious problems require more people be involved and keep quiet about it.
Given the risks of allowing someone to manufacture votes, this is clearly NOT an appropriate area to digitise.
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Mr Ethan, where have you been living?
Obviously you don't live in the US, because this has been going on here for as long as I can remember. Two large groups of opposing idiots each select the candidate that they think least openly demonstrates their idiocracy, then they expect us to choose between the two of them...
What kind of choice is that? The idiot on the right, or the idiot on the left? Doesn't really matter, because no matter who gets elected the same people are 'running' the country, while the chosen 'idiot' gets to distract us from the reality of what's going on (hey, perhaps they aren't all idiots after all, they got us all hooked and there's nothing we can do about it).
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If any of you out there are IT Professionals / Managers, you should know the phrase, "Do not institute technology for technologies sake." That should be every businesses moto. Just because something is cool and you can do it, does not mean that it will fix a current business need. We have a good system in place, some voting machines suck and are old, but you can replace them with scan tron. Don't spend money because something would be cool.
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Mis-quotes?
I also couldn't find any reference for the "One of the biggest lobbyists" comment, do you have a source?
The Wired article definitely reads like an advertisement for the company, though. But it's a legitimate topic. Paper ballots counted by people just isn't ever going to fly again, so we should at least invest some time looking at real alternatives. It's not unlike how the music industry has to understand that technology is radically changing the environment it operates in, and learn how to embrace those changes, rather than keep fighting to maintain its ancient paradigm.
Given that there's a big move in elections to permanent absentee voting, I'd like to see a security review that compares the various "internet voting" products to the security of mailed ballots.
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bunch of technophobes
And if you want to make sure idiots don't vote make voters pass a test first. If you think idiots aren't voting now look who they elected for president, TWICE!
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Re: bunch of technophobes
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Read the U.S. Constitution some time...
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
The system of Electoral College IS precisely what the Founders wanted. They had some pretty good reasons for this compromise - The LEAST of which was the technology of the day making it hard to hold a national election.
"One Man One Vote" is a myth. It does not work. Review your history.
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"Geeks" for e-voting arent real geeks.
'Cause real geeks would've watched Battlestar Galactica and know that the President would be who ever the Cylon's wanted the President to be.
If the Galactica sees fit to vote by paper ballots, then paper ballots out to be good enough for us.
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This is a bad idea.
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Okay here's a little example....
Hypothetically speaking I am a radical hacker and I want my party's nominee in office. These are the steps I follow to get him there.
1) Cast my Internet Vote, making sure I vote for another candidate.
2) Log the IP address of the server I just sent that packet of information to.
3) Bypass the security on said server (it can be done, just needs time)
4) Re-arrange things for my candidate to win
5) If caught, say, "It couldn't have been me. I voted for the other guy")
Just a thought.
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make it easy for the lazy to vote...
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VoteHere and Robert Gates
Gates was on the board of directors of VoteHere, a strange little company that was the biggest elections industry lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). VoteHere spent more money than ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia combined to help ram HAVA through. And HAVA, of course, was a bill sponsored by by convicted Abramoff pal Bob Ney and K-street lobbyist buddy Steny Hoyer. HAVA put electronic voting on steroids.
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Re: VoteHere and Robert Gates
Note the posts by Saul Iversen, member of the BBV Action Crew, who has actually dug into claims made by the VoteHere technology. He says the stuff works.
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Re: Re: VoteHere and Robert Gates
That said, there have been conflicting reports in the past as to what Robert Gates' association with VoteHere was. The fact is that Mr. Gates was on the advisory board of VoteHere and NOT the Board of Directors. That fact has been acknowledged by Bev Harris and Black Box Voting.org.
It is unknown to me at this time whether Mr. Gates was ever actually asked for any advice in his role as an "advisor", or what expertise he was tapped to offer.
What is known is that another former member of the VoteHere advisory board, Aviel Rubin, was offered stock options in return for his position as an "advisor" to VoteHere. Mr. Rubin was presented by VoteHere as an esteemed member of their "advisory board", although he was never asked for his opinion or advice on anything by the company during his tenure. To Mr. Rubins' credit, he never accepted any compensation from VoteHere for his 'work' (or lack thereof) as an 'advisor'.
In my humble opinion, this appears to be a case of 'corporate resume padding' for the sake of attracting investors.
Pat A. Vesely ;-)
Charter Member
Black Box Voting.org
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Re: Re: VoteHere and Robert Gates
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no...
At least with machine voting there is still a physical person there only letting authorized voters in to vote. if you go to internet voting then there is no accountability as for who voted for who, people will hack up other peoples votes even more than they do now
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Receipts - Bah!
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To: rstr5105
And don't even think of that stupid "use a proxy" or "SSL tunnel" garbage. Everything is traced, everywhere. It's the way the freakin' Internet -works-.
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Given all that we have accomplished in this country if our government wanted an online voting system we would have it.
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