Paper Trails Don't Ensure Accurate E-Voting Totals?

Slashdot | Paper Trails Don't Ensure Accurate E-Voting Totals

Now, voter-verifiable paper trails aside...what's with all the hullabaloo about e-voting? Paper isn't good enough? The FL/Chad issue is not present with all paper ballots. My town's ballots are pieces of yellow cardstock with partial arrows: >- -> pointing at candidates and Yes/No options. One takes a sharpie (or other black marker) and fills in an arrow. The ballots are then fed through a high-speed reader (basically a barcode reader writ-large) and votes are tallied. The ballots are durable and easily hand-recounted, which happens often, anyway.

Seriously, what's so wrong with that? People can screw up the ballots? Yes, but that's on the voter, not on some random company writing code that they don't let anyone look at (and it's isn't easily verified if it's even the code running on the machines) that likely has vested political interests, anyway ::choughDieboldcough::

Just because a bunch of idiots designed some terrible paper ballots doesn't mean all paper ballots are the devil. Most people think computers are magic and either trust or distrust them implicitly. Paper ballots are easily understood by anyone and do not qualify as 'magic' by any means.


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Piracy.problem >> Election.transparency.problem ??

Court: Protecting trade secrets takes priority over election transparency

OMFG. What's the point of elections when the makers of the voting machines could be rigging them and noone would know cuz the code is a 'trade secret'?!? Not to mention the fact that there are really only two manufacturers of voting machines and they're all buddy-buddy. Furthermore, honestly, what kind of trade secret might be contained in an electronic voting machine? Seriously, you're just tallying votes, people. Anyone holding a CS degree ought to be able to write a java or web-based gui for tallying votes. I honestly don't know what's so complicated about the software itself. Encryption has been implemented many times before, and they really shouldn't be developing their own.

Finally!

California Secretary of State - Voting Systems Review

These kinds of things, 'red team attacks' and 'going through the source code' needed to be done from day one, and instead they're being done some 6-7 years later.

But hey, it's only democracy, right? When have accurate votes ever been required?

I've studied some history, and I'm sorry, but this reeks of "Coup d'etat" all over....

The Tartan Online: Election results inaccessible

I mean, you have some guy being appointed as president by members of the old administration and promise of new elections once they find out who's responsible.

Seriously, though. I'm not crazy about some random appointee dealing with all the finances over the summer.

OMFG Diebold... Cont'd

Judge denies Diebold request to block ES&S pact with Massachusetts

Diebold 0; Massachusetts 3

Yay.

Seriously, good to know something still works around here, Diebold made frivolous claims that were a thinly veiled attempt to keep their claws around the throat of democracy. Luckily, a judge saw fit to work at loosening them a bit.

You go, California!

New California e-voting measure uses hackers to test voting machine security

Seriously, voting machines, if we're going to insist on electronic ones, should get hammered harder than an unprotected Windows box on the public internet, before they're deployed, and the companies that make them should welcome such attacks and then immediately fix those vulnerabilities. I mean, would you put yourself or your friends or family into a car whose manufacturer had refused to send to independent crash testing facilities? No, that's ludicrous, but that's just what Diebold and other's have done. They hold America's Democracy in their grubby little hands and then glare at us and lean closer to their desk whenever we try and look over their shoulder.

Anyone who ever honestly thought and said that voting machines ought to be a black box should be hanged, or at least deported.

I applaud California for both their Zero-Tolerance policy regarding voting machine manufacturer misconduct (this is one of the few places I'm 100% in favor of 'Zero Tolerance' policies) as well as further requiring (well, proposing to require) such intensive testing.

From the same people who brought you a series of tubes...

...politicians.

Voting Machines Banned by Dutch Minister (Good for the Dutch, btw)

Seriously, what's so bad about paper ballots, fundamentally? Nothing really.
Poor implementations of anything can be bad, just look at all those goofy attempts at planes back in the day? The ones with like, a hundred wings, or a big steam engine? (IE punch-card ballots) Just because those didn't work and are hilarious to look at today, doesn't mean that we should move to an electronic voting scheme.

Something I think a lot of people don't realize, is that it's a computer that initially counts your votes, anyway. It's not people. In my town, you take a yellow (I think) piece of card stock with a bunch of incomplete arrows (missing the middle segment), a sharpie, and you fill in the arrow for the candidate/issue you're voting for. Nice, simple, no hanging chads, easily verifiable by anyone who looks at it, and uses a simple bar-code scanner, basically, to record votes.
The whole punch-card system seemed a really bass-ackwards way of voting to begin with, like needing to use gunpowder, a fuse and a match to start your car, rather than the battery/electric motor we all know and love.

I think we just need more engineers in government.

Student Government Elections at Carnegie Mellon

I've posted them here for everyone's benefit.

I would like to point out that Optimus Prime and Readme each had a greater impact than Nader did in 2004 in the respective presedential elections, and if they'd run together, they would've beat Nader in 2000.

Also, note the senator sitations in CIT and CFA:
CIT: Both Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots and Readme, a weekly publication, beat out half or more of the CIT senators and in total garnered ~10% of the CIT vote.
They each also beat out the 4 write-ins tied for the 5th H&SS seat.

In CFA everyone wins due to the 4th place slot going to anyone with a single vote.

4 of my friends also managed to tie for 4th place in MCS, after starting their campaign half way through the final day of voting. They each received 7 votes.

Many write-ins expressed disdain about the current state of elections, such as this one from the election for VP of Finance:
BOTH CANDIDATES WRITE LIKE HIGH SCHOOLERS 1 0.10%

Others advertised WRCT radio shows (From Tepper Senate Elections):
SPORTSLINE AIRS TUESDAYS AT 10PM ON WRCT RADIO 1 1.45%

The following gems were from the CIT Senate race:
THE CUT ITS AN OPEN THOROUGHFARE 1 0.42%
I DIDNT GET TO HAVE A FUNNEL CAKE AT CARNIVAL 1 0.42%
EGGPLANT CURRY 1 0.42%
A VOTE FOR JOHN EASTRIDGE IS A VOTE FOR ROCK 1 0.42%
THE LARGEST SEA MAMMAL IS A WHALE 1 0.42%
HORSE AND BURRO ADOPTION FOR LIFE 1 0.42%

The three stooges each received a vote for MCS senate:
arry 1 0.86%
curly 1 0.86%
moe 1 0.86%

From H&SS Senate race:
NONE OF THE ABOVE 1 0.45%
THESE ELECTIONS ARE MEANINGLESS 1 0.45%
DISBAND SENATE 1 0.45%
NO CONFIDENCE 1 0.45%