[SGVLUG] Vote stealing

[Christopher Smith]

jmd wrote:
> On Sep 18, 2006, at 9:23 PM, Zack, James wrote:
>> If I vote, and I get a printed slip that says the wrong candidates
>> name on it, I am going to bark about election fraud long before my
>> ballot is stuffed into the box! It would work like this...
>>
>> Step 1 - Vote electronically, when finished, a paper ballot spits
>> outs that has the candidates name clearly printed on it
>> Step 2 - Voter visually confirms that is who they voted for before
>> depositing into the ballot box
>> Step 3 - Put ballot in ballot box
>>
>> I can't see where there can be fraud with that. Tabulation could be
>> done via the computers and use the paper ballots as backup or hand
>> tabulate them afterwards as confirmation.
> the visual confirmation would make all the difference in the world. i
> didn't think of that from the post i read. correct me if i am wrong,
> but i don't think visual confirmation is part of the main protocol in
> electronic voting in many areas. that would have to be mandatory for
> me to consider electronic as an option.
Visual confirmation is part of the protocol for all electronic voting
systems. This is one of the advantages of the systems. The problem is
that the confirmation is on the screen, not on a printout, so while this
basically eliminates over votes, under votes, and substantially reduces
misvoting (goodbye butterfly ballot!) it still leaves you with the
security problem if someone tampers with the internal vote counting
mechanism and provides no real backup mechanism for verifying the vote
count.

Earlier on in this thread someone raised the question as to the
advantages of using these new fangled technologies, and I suspect in
particular was referring to electronic voting. The answer is that it
substantially reduces the number of spoiled ballots, and it helps
traditionally disenfranchised groups to vote (specifically: the blind,
those with problems seeing, those who cannot read English, and those who
cannot read any language).

In all the hype about voter fraud, people fail to recognize that
election fraud at the ballot box is a much smaller problem than election
disenfranchisement, and ironically the two are linked. A lot of election
fraud happens before people get to the ballot box, but once they are the
occurrences of fraud represent a tiny fraction of the vote. One of the
easiest forms of election fraud, ballot stuffing, is enabled by low
voter turnout. So, if you can improve the number of votes that happen
and the number that get counted, you go a long way to mitigating the
problem.

Probably the best example of this comes from the Florida 2000
presidential election. Even upon further review by various newspapers
and accounting firms, roughly 140,000 ballots simply could not be
discerned as for one candidate or the other (and this wasn't surprising
to people familiar with election systems). That's over 2.3% of the
entire ballot count (think of how many states have been decided in
elections by that kind of margin), and that isn't counting the folks who
didn't vote because they couldn't find a ballot that they could
understand. I've seen estimates that as much as 7% of the ballot is
essentially lost due to short comings of traditional balloting systems.
I doubt electronic voting could grab all of that, but I suspect it could
grab a lot. THAT is something well worth going after.

On the fraud side, I think a lot of the notions of fraud are kind of red
herrings. Diebold's rather publicly partisan CEO (shocking! a CEO who's
a Republican!) has resigned from that position (and his position as
Chairman of the board), and the CEO's of Diebold and ES&S are brothers,
but you really shouldn't be quite so worried about the owners/CEOs of
the company. Imagine you're the CEO of one of these companies. In order
to tamper with the systems, you undoubtedly are going to need the aid of
multiple of your employees, any of which could choose to turn on you
(and all they'd have to do is record a conversation and then go to an
attorney general who is partisan for whatever side is being short
changed). I'd be much more worried about the front line employees (which
has been a problem in Diebold's case) and the processes in place to
ensure they don't hack the system for the highest bidder.

People have also raised the point that there is no federal agency that
controls or reviews voting systems, because it's a state responsibility.
I say hallelujah! to this. If a federal agency was in charge, the whole
operation would be run out of the White House which is invariably
partisan for one particular party. Trying to slip a fraud by 50
different state agencies is a *much* harder task (sure, slipping it by a
select five or ten may be easier, but you just know you're going to run
in to an ambitious secretary of state or attorney general who wants to
run for governor in at least a dozen, and if you doubt that, ask Diebold
how they are enjoying the review process in California ;-). In fact,
just trying to conform to 50 different state standards and processes
seems likely to keep ballot system makers far too busy to have time to
perpetuate a fraud.

The real problem with electronic voting systems is quality of the
systems in place now and the verification process. It seems clear that
the current systems were kind of slapped together, and haven't received
the broad levels of peer review you'd want for an election system. They
also aren't open systems (neither the hardware or the software), which
makes it difficult for the public to have confidence in their security
and reliability. This would probably all be okay (less than ideal, but
okay) but for the fact that the systems have such crummy verification
mechanisms in the event that the integrity of the system is breached
(electronic voting systems probably have the most sophisticated
verification systems available for the case where there isn't a system
breach... but then you are kind of less worried aren't you? ;-).

The ATM-style paper ballot notion was most famously advanced by Bruce
Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/essay-039.html

It's a seemingly obvious and simple process for fixing the problem.

There are a catch with it though. First you have the problem of a high
failure rate. As high as the failure rate of electronic voting systems
is right now, printers have an even higher rate. Plus you get things
like paper jams and other wonderful "semi-failure" cases. This is
exacerbated by the need to keep the systems sealed and tamper proof
(what, you ran out of ink? umm... I can't open it up and stick in
another cartridge). The solution, as I see it, is to have the printers
be a separate component from the rest of the system, and rig it so that
they can be hooked up to any of the computer systems. Then, you just
have more printers (probably many more) than voting systems, and swap in
working units as other units fail. As a final backup, you could even
have paper ballots where someone can mark off how they vote just like
they do with optical scanners, and the computer system can scan and
verify the votes with the voter. If the whole thing fails one would then
fill out a paper ballot much as is done with provision ballots right now.

Oh, and someone mentioned issues with thermal paper. I'd actually
recommend dot-matrix printers. Load yes, but very quick for text, and
because the printer head makes a physical impression on the paper, it's
even harder to perpetrate a fraud.

The catch though, is that all that is rather expensive, and you have to
wonder we are really prepared to pay the price for this kind of
capability at the ballot box, particularly given the fact that there are
so many other parts of the process that deserve scrutiny.

--Chris