picture too wide, not all visible in my firefox
HTML is still a bit of a mystery to me -- there's got to be a way of resizing things that's better than trial and error, (and that doesn't mess up the line weights) but I do not know what it is.
I should note that from reading the story, the anti-virus software seems to have been not on the literal voting machines, but on the computers used to tabulate the votes. Doesn't matter, of course; those should also be isolated from the Internet and not have any software other than what's necessary for the purpose loaded on them.
3: It's called Photoshop (or the equivalent). Especially for texty and liney images. ..but you knew that.
LB, Karl Rove's polling company needs internet access to these machines in order to keep the American people well informed. Information must be free!
And yes to me it is literally insane to take the route the US has on voting technology. But if nothing else it serves as an ongoing reminder of the epic asshattery of the majority opinion on Bush v Gore.
Never assume incompetence when evil is a possibility.
There was a story some years back about an ostensibly third-world country that used electronic voting machines, and had implemented them really well; maybe I read about it on Schneier's blog? I don't know.
I was hoping that someone here would blog that cartoon. One of the best XKCD in a while.
Can we get real, useful federal legislation back on the radar on this issue?
Congress should be happy to get to that right after they finish up the legislation authorizing local police departments to join with the feds in nationwide domestic political surveillance.
max
['If you can't spy on domestic political opposition, who CAN you spy on?']
Wait, you mean I don't need to wear this condom while I'm teaching?
9: You may be thinking of Brazil.
They certainly were pioneers in the area. There are probably approaches to electronic voting* that might work, but they include things such as making the software public domain and widely published, paper trail (or some form of voter-verifiable doublecheck.
Wear a snappy-looking, rad condom. The student of today is really turn off by those boring old functional hygienic condoms.
9, 13: India also has much less controversial electronic voting.
12: Wait, you mean I don't need to wear this condom while I'm teaching?
Exterminator needed in aisle 3.
Hand marked, hand counted paper ballots. They aren't broken and don't need fixing. Voting machines are only needed for manipulating elections[*]. If getting the results within hours of the polls closing is really vital (it isn't) the ballots can be machine counted initially before being cross checked by humans.
[*] There are access issues for people with disabilities, but they can be handled without going to black box voting systems.
Eight years since the FL fiasco, and this kind of thing is still going on? Unfathomable. Incidentally, I was getting cash from a Diebold ATM last night, and it offered me a receipt—a paper trail! Who'd a thunk it?
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Hey Ben, are you going to hear Nico Muhly and Sam Amidon? I recommend it (went last night), though the Doveman stuff was kind of boring.
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Since this is a political thread I guess I can vent about one of the most fatuous campaign articles* that I have seen in The Times recently. "McCain Displays Credentials as Obama Relaxes".
Any number of vomitaceous parts to it, this may be the worst:
On the other hand, the fluency with which Mr. McCain, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, discusses Georgia, citing the history of the region** and the number of times he has visited, lends an aura of commander in chief. And as if he already had a cabinet, Mr. McCain said he was dispatching his allies Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, to the region.
Although he gives that tripe a run for its money later when he explores the "Hawaii too exotic" trope. Also note no discussion of "presumption". The whole thing easily could have been an RNC press release.
*Excluding columnists like Dowd of course.
**Holy fuck, I guess being Wiki Man gives you superbuff prez credentials.
I missed this when it actually happened, but it's awesome. They taught a chimp to hack a Diebold vote tabulator. A chimp. We are so fucked.
20: Eight years since the FL fiasco, and this kind of thing is still going on?
To an extent, Diebold-etc has been sold as a fix to Florida2000. Remember that the most notorious problems were in non-electronic systems: the misaligned pages of the Buchanan-voting precinct, and the physical properties of punched-out computer cards aka chads.
Hey Ben, are you going to hear Nico Muhly and Sam Amidon? I recommend it (went last night), though the Doveman stuff was kind of boring.
Does the pope shit in the woods?
20-25: Yeah ... a friend of mine gave me the Doveman Footloose. Good concept, but the execution was slow and melancholy without actually striking me as emotionally meaningful.
Does the pope shit in the woods?
On our camping trip last weekend, I explained this phrase to PK.
24: True, but now we've known about the problems with electronic systems for years, and there's not the political will to do anything meaningful about them (or rather, to give evil its due, there is the political will not to do anything about them).
Does the pope shit in the woods?
I meant to figure that out when I was in Rome—give him coffee and a bran muffin some morning, follow him around for a while. But the plan never worked out, so I still don't know.
There are several schismatic sects around which argue that deny the Pope is not Catholic. However, I don't believe that they have any doctrine one way or another on bears shitting in the woods.
S/B "argue that the Pope is not Catholic" or "deny that the Pope is catholic". We regret the error.
For an at least partially innocent explanation for why things are all screwed up, it's federalism again. For problems with a simple, clear, good enough right answer, the sort of creativity you get by having 50 independent 'laboratories of democracy' is a terrible thing: even if most states get things fairly right, you just need a couple of lunatics or criminals to preserve problems in their states.
It's interesting that Chuck Hagel seems to be supporting Obama. Can he really be all the voter Mr ChangeYouCanBelieveIn needs?
There was a story some years back about an ostensibly third-world country that used electronic voting machines, and had implemented them really well
Probably Estonia. They've somewhat improbably implemented one of the most successful electronic voting systems in the world. They actually have internet-based elections (though Estonians can also vote at conventional polling places).
Just as John is right but ignored about the desirability, or rather necessity, of sinking some hundreds of millions into an alternative media system, this is another missed opportunity for people left of center with money. I can't imagine it would take more than a few million dollars to produce a complete open-source vote tallying and reporting system, plus a hardware spec using thoroughly commoditized, off-the-shelf parts.
The fun part would be getting it used in test tallies against the commercial systems.
20: I hate the ATM analogy. Banking systems aren't a good analogy with voting systems; do you think it would be okay for the box to know who you were and record how you voted? And so on.
39: My point was that the machine that dispenses the cash and issues a receipt is made by the same company that has been protesting that providing a paper trail isn't feasible.
I suppose that protest is dumb, but I find it kind of pointless. ATM printers fail pretty regularly ("This machine can not dispense a receipt - do you want to continue?"). I also don't think receipts are much defense - you'd have to print something under glass and hope that the voter would check it to see if it matched what they thought they did, and have the ability to do something if it didn't. Receipts you can take with you aren't helpful, either; they may also be a flat-out bad idea.
But the thing is that none of those problems is insurmountable. Polling places are staffed by people who could unjam the printer or add paper or replace ink cartridges; a machine could easily be designed to allow voters to review their votes without taking the receipt (in fact, Diebold/PES has come up with such a system). Manufacturers of voting machines get away with the most egregious bullshit in the interest of protecting their profits while the voting system is allowed to fall into a shambles with disastrous consequences.
Oh, no disagreement that this is a shambles and a scandal. I just think that trying to make DRE voting machines better or more auditable is wasted effort.
38: It might take a few million(s) more to lobby it successfully through the various state legslatures. Diebold doesn't run the system of choice because it's the best one out there.
Well, yeah, Parsimon. It'd be part of a PR campaign.
I don't know how much the varieties of lobbying efforts cost, and I'd be terrible at estimating the levels of millions involved in various efforts. Some cost a lot. I guess you'd need to start by taking down Diebold in some way.
That is, this is not a nay-saying set of comments. Rather, as is obvious, the "complete open-source vote tallying and reporting system, plus a hardware spec using thoroughly commoditized, off-the-shelf parts" you describe might be the least of the investment involved in actually putting it in place.
Yeah, I'm aware of that. (See comments elsewhere about the high costs of change, including (as John keeps pointing out and keeps needing credit for) building up some replacement media.) It's about context-shifting - moving the Overton window, if you prefer that phrasing. When I hear conversations in passing about voting, as about a lot of things, I hear people not inclined to trust the sanctioned story but unsure as to whether that's just wishful thinking or what. Tangible examples help pin things down, and can turn unease into support for a practical campaign.
Then it becomes a matter for something like Accountable America to go to work with, for people to demonstrate in hearings, and so on.
41: I'm not crazy about 'receipts'. What I'd like to see, for any touch screen machine, is a printer that prints out a piece of paper that's both human and machine readable, that the voter folds in half, walks across the room, and drops in a ballot box (having an opportunity to tear it up and try again if it somehow came out wrong). The touch screen machine could keep a preliminary tally, but the official record, to be counted at leisure, would be the paper.
49- I proposed something like that in a thread here a couple years ago. The voting machines I currently use are fill-in-the-bubble forms that you insert into a reader when you leave- they have one of the lowest error rates of any system, and of course you can open up the box to recount and audit the physical papers by hand. The machines spit it back out if a bubble isn't filled in right.
All you need to do is keep that reader and just make computers that can convert your touch-screen input into a completed form that you check before handing it in. This solves the disabled access problem. If your lines are too long, you can add additional voting stations for people willing to use the old fashioned method by opening a 12-pack of bic pens.
49: That is a good idea. It gives you the preliminary computerized results to (maybe*) satisfy the media demand for immediacy (This is truly one of the roots of the problem, along with a pernicious desire to make voting more "efficient" in terms of dollars spent.), and an auditable, believable official result later.
*You'd get a jazillion Broderesque columns hand-wringing over what an existential crisis it would be if the later results did not match the computer ones . Better to just let the crooks win in that case and keep the illusion going**.
**This same column could be (and has been) written with regard to impeachment, investigations, imprisoning Scooter Libby, and on and on and on. It's the ur-column of the modern political punditocracy.
51 - There are real merits to electronic voting, including adaptive voting for the blind and the ability to have ballots in dozens of languages without the expense of making sure Hmong voters can read the language initiatives or whatever. It's just been run as a decade-long staggering bipartisan clusterfuck. I think most computer security specialists have been gobsmacked by the levels of incompetence and disingenuousness exhibited by Diebold et al., not to mention state secretaries of state and election officials who have pisssed tens of millions of dollars down a rathole. At least setting the money on fire might have kept someone warm.
52 - language initiatives s/b ballot initiatives
Wait. Adaptive voting for the blind on a touch-screen type machine has to involve sound, somehow, which potentially violates the secrecy of the ballot box. What's wrong with braille? Or, you know, just letting someone go into the booth with the person who needs assistance?
The multiple language thing, yes. The expense is an issue. It oughtn't be, but sadly it is.
Adaptive voting for the blind on a touch-screen type machine has to involve sound, somehow, which potentially violates the secrecy of the ballot box. What's wrong with braille? Or, you know, just letting someone go into the booth with the person who needs assistance
Many, many blind people cannot read braille, many will not have a trusted companion to bring with them, and voting stations already have difficulty getting sufficient staff. Sound can be transmitted with headphones, but having someone in the booth with the person automatically violates the secrecy of the voting box.
Fair enough. I realized that the not being able to read braille thing was an issue (hence, letting someone in the booth). But you're right (though there are a lot of people who require assistance voting, and I think that's kind of just one of those things we accept).
The receipt idea won't work. It's not all that hard to have the receipt reflect the choice the person made and the actual count to be something else entirely. Plus, we'd want something that would be auditable in the case of a problem, and several million crumpled receipts won't help.
Here our ballots are scantrons that we fill out with felt-tip pens. It's like school without the number #2 pencils, and then the ballots go in a box. I like SP's idea a lot. Have the electronic machine be an interface and printer whose job it is to fill out a printed scantron. Load it up with languages and whatever interface would help the blind, and then it could print the sheet. (Not sure how the blind person could verify the scantron, but I'm sure someone can figure this out.) The person then can check their scantron, and put it in the box which counts the vote.
