Voting Machines Redux

Haven't heard the usual furor about voting machines this year.
Just the unfortunately now-standard commotion about "you're keeping our people away from the polls"
and "but you're registering non-existent people".

But voting machines are still broken and dangerous and dangerously broken if I recall correctly.

Has the public just decided not to worry about this any more until some hacker makes 12 states vote 100% for Frank Zappa
and the Hockey Mothers of Convention?

Anyone? Anyone? Wallach?

Well, Robert F. Kennedy is concerned, but I am surprised that there really hasn't been more outrage.

But OK, I am partial - Harri Hursti used to work with/for me back in the old EUnet days...

Does it matter this time around? The way the media in the UK portrays it, Obama is the only candidate anyway.

It matters. If 3 votes in one state where one candidate is winning by a landslide, are counted wrong on purpose, it matters. And no, Obama isn't the only candidate at all, plenty of people are voting for McCain, it is close in several states (in my opinion, close is less than 10% apart. I don't quite trust the accuracy of polls.)

He might be - but I am all too afraid Mccain might "win" anyway. Somehow. Magically. Unfortunately I guess it is too late to get independent election monitors in.

Oh, if only that were the case. The way US Presidential elections work, each state votes and then all of that state's votes go to the winner of the state. Right now, the polls have Obama with a significant lead taking that into consideration, but many of the state elections are very close. A small deviation from poll numbers could have a very significant effect.

For a quick overview, take a look at Pollster.com or FiveThirtyEight.com.

Interesting links, thanks.

Or at least he was when that article was written a little over 2 years ago.


Agreed! With all the interest in this election, why hasn't this topic surfaced again?

Also, thanks for the Hursti_Hack link! Interesting.

Mmmm.. letmesee.. short attention span of USA media, perhaps?

To steal a march on Jonathan Swift, I have A Modest Proposal.

Why couldn't we have a system where people could vote on-line if they so chose?

I've given this some thought, and of course the biggest problem boils down to identification of the voter, how to prevent fraud through people casting multiple ballots or ineligible people voting.

I think the problem might be solved with biometrics. My wife's laptop computer has a little doohickey on it that scans her fingerprint to determine if she is authorized to log on. What if there were some sort of independent, non-partisan election clearing house whose duty was to tally internet votes. Those people who wanted to vote internet would have their index fingerprint on file. Those too paranoid to trust someone to keep one of their fingerprints would be relegated to voting the normal way, with paper ballots or voting machines.

Now, it is unlikely that computers at the internet voting site would be able to look at a fingerprint and instantly compare it to 20 million fingerprints on file, so there would have to be a system of matching a single fingerprint to a known sample. This could be done by issuing a unique password to each person who registered to vote by internet. The voter would log onto the internet voting site, send his password and his fingerprint, and if the two corresponded he would be allowed to vote.

The vote tally would be kept in a database with a simple structure that would be accessible to the voter after the polls closed. He could access (but not change) his ballot after the election and be certain that no fraud was perpetrated on it. In the same way, the entire database would be made accessible to auditors to make sure that the final tallys matched the data. Enough individual voters would check their ballots after the election that any widespread cheating would be detected immediately. Votes would be entered simultaneously into widely separated identical databases monitored by independent groups. Maybe the Democrats would have one, the Republicans another, one for the League of Women Voters, one for National Public Radio, you get the idea. This would make things pretty much tamper-proof, as each database could be compared to the others to be sure they all matched.

Registering to vote by internet would be done the same way voter registration is handled now -- proof of citizenship, ID and residence, plus providing a fingerprint. The registrant would be on the internet voter registration list, and removed from the "at the polls" list.

One concern to be addressed would be privacy. Since the ballots would be accessible through the voter's password, and the voting website would have to have a list of passwords to verify that the voter was eligible to participate, it would theoretically be possible to match individuals to their ballots. To prevent this, the passwords would not be kept with the voter registration information, but just sent on to the vote talley site along with the corresponding fingerprint without any other identification.

There are other problems, like what is the procedure if a voter pretends to forget his password? How would you purge his old password and fingerprint from the voting website?

I guess the big question is, could this idea actually work? I am not suggesting that everybody be required to vote this way, it would just open up another avenue of voting that would greatly enhance voter turnout. You could extend the voting period for internet voting without incurring additional expense -- let the internet voters begin voting a week before the polls closed. Even people without computers could vote by internet, internet access is available at every library in the country, and probably most of the Starbucks as well.

When I get to be King of the World, that's how the elections will be run.

Except for the one that elects the King, that is.

tanstaafl.

The biggest (and most obvious) problem with such a scheme, is, most of the voters would probably be using Microsoft software, along with many layers of the associated malware.

It would be incredibly easy to hijack all of their votes, just as nearly all of their machines today are used to remail spam.

-ml

No, it wouldn't. The only way a ballot could be added to the database would be with a password and the registered voter's fingerprint.

Any hijacking would be immediately visible. If thousands of voters' ballots were missing or changed in the database when the voters checked on them, a big fuss would be made immediately. It wouldn't matter what software was used to place the ballot into the secure, audited, linux-OS database. Once the ballot got in, it would be secure and could be be immediately confirmed by the voter as being correct.

tanstaafl.

When it comes to IT and systems, I sometimes use something I call the "alien test". If a flying saucer landed and the little green gent got out and asked "Hey, what are you doing?" could we explain what we were doing and why in a way that the alien could appreciate? Or would he think we were nuts and destroy us with his death ray because we made him irritable? I find this test very useful when it comes to issues of complexity -- is what we are doing as simple as possible and only as complex as is necessary? If what we are doing is very complex, can we tell the green dude why?

I'm probably a bit of a wet blanket, but I think that any online scheme involving multi-factor authentication would have a lot of areas of exposure/risk -- hijacked computers/browsers, stolen thumbs, diversion of identified voting results to the King ("Off with their thumbs!").

While I would like something better, the simple unassociated nature of putting an anonymous ballot in a bubble reader works for me -- and absentee ballots and motor-voter stuff that just makes it easier to vote without much more complexity and that are generally usable by most/all potential voters.

I have to say that the notion of somebody sitting in their 43rd floor penthouse and sliding their thumb over a reader while the lumpen underclass struggles below with a broken pencil, well, it kind of seems like something out of a Heinlein novel!

The Estonians have already done it

All of which passes through the malware, which can hack it at will.


Not from the same PC it was originally intercepted by..

There's a lot to be said for paper ballots.

Cheers

The biggest problem is the disenfranchisement of those without access to the internet. Yes, I know that voting in person would still exist, but you're lowering the bar for the wealthy, and making a distinction between classes is bad. You're going to make it so that the bar to voting for the wealthy is taking five minutes whenever you want, whereas the bar for voting when you're not is standing in line for half a day during business hours.

The other problem is the ability to associate votes with an individual. The current notion is that while votes are initially counted electronically, they are counted off of a piece of human-readable paper that the voter can easily read and that can be easily read by other humans in case of a recount. The reason you want people to be able to see their vote is so that they can have that same feeling of trust that the votes that they cast are the votes they intended. However, it also allows people's votes to be verified by third parties, thus creating an avenue for the purchasing of votes. Right now, if someone pays someone else to vote, there is no way to verify what his vote was. But under your system, the vote purchaser could require that the voter show his vote confirmation before getting paid.

Note that the problem you're trying to solve is the same one being brought up with the advent of electronic voting machines. The obvious solution is for the electronic voting machine to produce a human- and machine-readable paper ballot that is then tallied by a different system. You still get the benefits of a simpler UI, but you gain the ability for the voter to verify his vote before it is tallied.

I've never quite understood why the "UI" of voting was the source of such problems. Surely it's just a sheet of paper with a list of names, each with a big box next to it? You put a big X in the big box corresponding to the name you like the sound of. Job done.

You can then use Optical Mark Recognition to figure out which big box the big X was put in, and therefore which name most people like the sound of.

Wow, let me see if I can address some of the questions here. This topic is a big part of what I do for a living...

Why not vote on the Internet? mlord sums up one significant objection: evil malware on the voting terminal could show one thing while doing another. A second objection is that somebody could watch over you shoulder while you vote, thus voiding your privacy and enabling voter coercion / bribery. Estonia tried to address this by letting you vote multiple times, with only the last one counting. That means that there's a big database somewhere that has your name next to your vote. Not reassuring. Also, you authenticate via your national ID card (a smartcard thing). Somebody could watch you vote then "borrow" your card until the election is over.

Sophisticated "end-to-end" cryptographic techniques can work around the malware platform issue, but cannot do anything about the coercion issue. See, for example, Helios.

(We're using similar crypto machinery in our VoteBox voting system, which appears more like a "standard" electronic voting machine.)

Is the media following this issue? My phone seems to be ringing off the hook. I was on NPR Science Friday last week. I'll be on several other radio stations this week. The press is definitely covering the issue. Of course, it's not the #1 problem these days.

So what about this UI problem? Surely it can't be that hard to do? Actually, it can, because we're not dealing with "normal" computer users. We're dealing with every registered voter, which means older people who don't use computers and illiterate people and non-native speakers, and on and on.

The current, most likely culprit, particularly notably in West Virginia for some reason, is typically misnamed "vote flipping", and is really the result of touch-screen calibration issues. If you hit what you think is the proper area for your candidate and it selects the one above, you (computer geek, reader of this board) will simply aim lower and try again, knowing that you're compensating for a bogus calibration. A non-trivial percentage of voters won't know to do that.

And one other thing, in response to wfaulk: surely the answer must be to attach paper printout gadgets to electronic voting machines, right?

Sadly, no. I was one of the big proponents of this idea until I saw the results of human subject experiments. The punch line: 63% of test voters failed to notice deliberately inserted errors on the summary screen. (And the test subjects just loved using our evil, lying machine!)

This is why I'm increasingly favoring the crypto solutions, which let you catch a machine as it's cheating.

Do you mean that this is the way you think voting (in the US) does work, or that it's the obvious solution?

This is the contentious ballot from Florida in 2000. Seems pretty straightforward, right? And the NC (where I live) ballot(pdf) is being commented on as this year's poor UI ballot because of the presidential vote being distinct from the straight-party vote. Neither of those really seem very difficult, do they? But people are idiots.

It's not exactly that people are idiots. It's more that some tasks are intuitive, some tasks are trained, and other tasks are counter-intuitive or counter to prior training.

Canonical example: how many doors have you seen with a "push" or "pull" sign on them? If you have to explain it, you've already failed. If a door is a "push" door, then you shouldn't have a pull handle on it!

Car nerd example: recent BMWs have been dorking with the turn signal indicator. Rather than what we all know and love, where the turn signal physically locks up/down until you turn the wheel, they've been doing it all in software. Guess what? People will get it wrong because it's just weird and different.

Now, let's take North Carolina's unique rule that "straight ticket" voting doesn't apply to the presidential race. This is giving both parties fits, since they now feel the need to generate instructions for voters ("vote straight ticket then vote for our guy for president"). Those same instructions, once they cross the border to a different state with different rules, are now a recipe for getting voters to deselect their presidential candidate preference.

To wrap your brain around the extent of the problem, take off your computer wonk hat and put yourself in the shoes of somebody who's never touched a computer beforehand. How are you supposed to figure out whether you've got it right? It's not so simple any more.

Oh, sure, perfectly straighforward. No chance of confusion here...

a. A Straight Party vote is a vote for all
candidates of that party in partisan offices.

b. You may select a Straight Party AND
ALSO vote for a candidate of a different
party

c. In any multi-seat race, a Straight Party
vote is a vote for ALL candidates of that
party.

tanstaafl.

Thanks, Dan. I'll look for and grab the Science Friday podcast.

I'm glad the media are covering it.
I guess I haven't seen anything about it this year (besides the bogus "vote flipper" thing), though I've heard more than enough about pigs, lipstick, acorns, plumbers, expensive wardrobes, crazy preachers, counting your residences, wearing traditional costumes, how many countries are visible from which point, how much both candidates love Jesus and how much they'll both cut my taxes, not cut out a single one of their campaign promises, and still somehow magically fund this surprise trillion dollar extra outlay.

Yet somehow I'm supposed to care more about all of that silly nonsense than the fact that our vote tallying process is less robust than it was 20 years ago.

...anyway... It seems to me that voting-machine-related fraud is one of the biggest threats to the "sanctity" of our democracy.
(Yes, idiocy of the electorate is a bigger long-term problem, but in the meantime, let's make sure that every idiot's vote is properly counted,
and then try to convince people to make rational decisions and that they ought to demand more from the candidates than soundbites and detail-free "debates".)

I.e.,

• the government should make good on its end of the bargain to properly record what the people ask for, and
• the people should try to make good on their end of the bargain and vote on more than just color, party, "what's in it for me?", propaganda, emotion, or one single pet issue.
  This is especially true for senate and house elections.

I certainly find that Florida one very confusing, but then it is unlike any ballot paper I have seen in the UK, so maybe if I was used to US ballot papers it would have been clearer. That staggered layout seems guaranteed to cause confusion.

I keep hearing that people are standing in line for hours in the US to vote. Is this really true ? Is this normal ? Does this happen in all areas or maybe just in poor areas ?

I can't remember ever having to wait more than 20 minutes to vote in the UK. If you had to wait for hours I imagine the UK turnout would be even more appallingly low than it already is.

No. It doesn't. A ballot paper should have a column of names on the left, and a column of big boxes on the right. The problem with that one is the fact that the names alternate left and right, and that the "boxes" aren't big, and that they're not boxes.

Your second one could be solved by having a separate piece of paper for each post. It worked fine for us in London earlier this year.

Admittedly, we're still counting ours by hand, but "putting a big X in a big box" would work fine with OMR.

My god that is a badly designed "interface" and I'd consider myself to have a pretty good eye... The arrows don't even line up with the exact centre of the dot. No wonder people got confused.

Wow.. that Florida ballot is almost criminal! No wonder the Republicans won that state -- just gotta be at the top of that particular ballot and you're guaranteed more votes!

And the NC ballot.. mmm.. too much reading required for a crowded voting room. But even so, it actually encourages blind voting along strict party lines (except for the pres/veep), which only serves to further polarize politics and the country.

Dumb, dumb, dumber.

Oh well.

First, this is "early voting", which has only been in existence in the US for about 10 years or so. Given that a large number of voters only vote every 4 years, that's not a lot of iterations. Before then, everybody voted on a single day.

The difference is that there are far fewer early voting places than normal voting places. For example, in my county there were about a dozen early voting places, but there will be about 200 polls open tomorrow. But the early voting places were available for weeks. Meaning you could find a good day to spend a while voting.

I'd say that, generally speaking, people wait no more than an hour in an average election, and probably far less time than that in the majority of cases. However, this is no average election. In NC in 2004 (the last presidential election), about 3.5 million people voted. This time, it's expected to be around 4.6 million. 2.6 million have already voted.

Yes. People are standing in line for hours. And it's because they have unusually strong feelings about this election. At least part of that is due to Bush's approval ratings being in the ranks of the lowest scores ever received by a US president over the past few weeks.

I have no idea what the actual election day lines will look like tomorrow. But I'm going to find out.

Yeah. I'm all in favor of getting rid of straight-ticket voting. But it's not like NC is the only state that does that. I'd be surprised if there were many states that didn't.

I, too, find these long lines surprising.
The last 2 or 3 times I've gone to vote, there have been 4-6 voting stations and 1-2 voters at them.
In fact, in the past decade, my maximum voting wait time has probably been 2 minutes.

Maybe that's because California has elections all the time and people don't bother to show up due to voter fatigue,
or maybe it is because everybody in my region mails their ballot in far in advance.
Or maybe it is because California's vote is always so lopsided that people don't feel it necessary to show up.

In any case, I'll be very curious to see if there are any lines at all when I go to vote tomorrow.

Perhaps there will be because we have several hotly contested propositions this time. (Gay marriage, and a couple of alternative energy propositions.)

I think 17 states have straight ticket voting. NC is unique in having its straight ticket selections not apply to the presidential race. Totally inexplicable.

To avoid long lines, think about your home precinct's demographics. If you live in the suburbs and most people commute into the city to work, then queues will be longest in the morning, before work, or in the evening, after work.

Personally, I voted early, two weeks ago. I showed up at 8:40am and there was literally no line at all. In and out in ten minutes, and that includes dorking around with the voting machine UI so I could write a blog post about it.

Here in Canada, SWMBO & I regularly vote at the "advance (early) polls", weeks before the main event.

This year, with our month-long trip to Italy beginning just days after the election was called, we went in to vote before even the advance polls were open.

Since nominations weren't even completed back then, we used blank ballots and hand wrote in the candidate's name.

We enjoy voting, but wish it were not necessary as often as it has been of late.

I didn't realize that the straight-ticket not including the President and Vice President was law. I figured it was just the vagaries of the board of elections. I wonder what the reasoning was for that.

I bet it gets changed in the general assembly this year.

Exactly what is done here, San Joaquin County, California. There is a reader in each polling place, the ballot is read and goes directly into an internal hopper. Spoiled ballots are rejected, accounted for, and the voter is given another to mark.

Edit: The ballots themselves are a bit larger than an 8.5x11 inch piece of paper. There is a special envelope that holds the ballot, hiding the marks, ballot and envelope are held to the machine where the ballot is sucked out, maintaining your vote's secrecy.

I did enjoy this line from Plastic: "If you experience an election lasting longer than four hours, consult your doctor"...

Peter

Long lines are exacerbated by electronic voting machines. If there aren't enough machines, the queues just keep growing. In places with paper-based voting, additional voting booths can be cobbled together from cardboard boxes on spare desks and tables, if need be.

Still, even with old-school paper ballots, we're seeing stories of long queues. My fear is that this will convince our political leaders that vote-by-mail is the solution. ("It works for Oregon, so it will clearly work everywhere else!") VBM is attractive in that there's never a line. It's also clearly a disaster in that it makes it far too easy to sell your ballot.

How big of a problem is selling votes? I would think that anything on a large enough scale to be effective would be extremely difficult to get away with.

I know when my absentee ballot was lost in the mail the worker at the registrar's office just marked it as spoiled in the computer and gave me a new one. Multiple submits with the last one counting seems like it would solve the problem. You could add a count-this-and-not-future-ballots checkbox if you'd like to let someone submit a last minute poser-ballot to make the buyer/intimidator happy.

On a different topic, I think it's outrageous that absentee ballots require stamps. Mine even requires two stamps to actually have correct postage.

Prior to the secret ballot's Australian invention in the 1850's (and world-wide adoption by the 1890's), votes were in no way anonymous, and bribery/coercion was rampant.

If you want to give up on anonymity, I can tell you a great voting system. We'll publish everybody's name in the newspaper with how they voted and give you up to a week to correct it. That will do wonders for accuracy. But tell me, do you really want that?

Yup, as was mentioned over in the parallel thread. Fascinating reading...

On PBS's Nightly Business Report last night there was actually a story about how this might be the last election which uses electronic voting machines and how many of the voting machine makers have either gone bankrupt or might throw in the towel as the machines have become enormously unpopular with state and local purchasers.
Also mentioned that Diebold has gotten the most (presumably bad) press but the least share of the profit from machine sales.

If this is the end of the electronic voting machines for now, then Good Riddance I say.

On matthew_k's point about vote selling, I just wanted to comment that an article I once read (perhaps in Technology Review (?) ) about electronic voting mentioned that just a slight, subtle, hard-to-detect shifting of the vote count could often have a major effect on highly contested races. And that anyone with any sense wouldn't cause the rigged vote to be "100% one way in any given precinct".

I presume this also applies to a lesser degree with vote selling, though it's probably much harder to coordinate and much more likely to be detected.

I dunno. I'd think that human nature, and flaws in human organizational systems, would indicate that it'd be easier to get people to throw elections (ie, deliberately miscount hand ballots, etc.) than it would be to hack voting machines. That's probably part of the reasoning behind the argument for having electronic voting in the first place.

Someone pointed out to me at lunch today why the law is that way. It was a totally partisan effort by NC Democrats to allow people to vote Republican in the national election and vote Democratic in local elections. As it turns out, it seems to have worked. NC has a long history of voting R for president but voting D for local office, or at least having D candidates be viable, which is much more than can be said for most other southern states.

So I take back my prediction.

Surely the mechanisation of vote fraud, like all mechanisation, is about the multiplication of effort. To suborn a national election by mis-counting hand ballots, and do it by a small enough and widespread enough margin to not get caught, you need to suborn at least one person per voting precinct. How much easier, to suborn one person per voting machine manufacturer? or perhaps someone with warehouse keys just before the machines are sent out?

Also, paper ballots can be re-counted, as long as you've kept ballot boxes under reasonable physical security. So actual mis-counting, as opposed to stuffing, would come up on a re-count. There's no audit trail for an electronic voting machine, unless you count ones policed by the same people you didn't trust to make the voting machines work right in the first place.

Peter

How about this: Have the machine print out a paper ballot that lists only the selected candidates, but then require the voter to manually mark that ballot for each candidate. I don't know that that would work, but it seems like a reasonable idea to study.

The challenge is minimizing the difficulty of the task for the voter. Any additional thing you ask a voter is something they can get wrong. Once you look at things through a lens like this, it really changes your thinking. That's why plain vanilla bubble-form paper ballots are so attractive: the task you're asking the voter to do is straightforward and simple (with the clear exception of straight ticket issues).

In essence, complexity is the dragon that we need to slay. Anything that can reduce complexity is desirable, even if that means changing things around. Example 1: North Carolina's unique straight ticket rules. Example 2: Australia's incomprehensible preference scheme. There are many others.

(In Australia, voters are effectively asked to specify a permutation of maybe 100 different candidates for Parliament. Since this task is virtually impossible to do without error, the parties helpfully offer "macros" where you can say "I'll have what they recommend" with a single checkbox. The major parties will, of course, put their candidates first and will put their natural competition, who voters might rationally desire as a second choice, all the way at the bottom. I'm told that something like 95% of Australians use the "macro" option rather than specifying their own permutation of the candidates.)

It's not even really a macro in Australia. You mark the candidates in order 1 to however many if you want. If you want you can just put a single 1 for just one candidate and then that candidate's preferences are given to the remainder in their order.

The Senate is a whole other world. There's something like 200 or 300 names which you number in order from 1 to however many. Same deal though - you can put a single 1 in.

Also the candidates hand out how to vote cards as you walk in to tell you how they want you to vote.

I just wanted to mention my experience in Fairfax County, VA, where I've voted on electronic machines for years.

This year, my old precinct was still doing the majority of their voting electronically. They had one box for accepting paper ballots waaay in the back, but was (I found out later) almost entirely for curb-side voting for the handicapped.

At my new precinct, before we entered the voting place a woman handed us two paper ballots. Scratch that, she practically shoved them in our hands saying "Take these!" When we got in the room, we noticed three or four electronic voting machines. I asked the person in the room why they weren't using the machines, and she had two responses:

1) she was slightly surprised and perturbed that the woman outside didn't even mention the choice of the machines

2) she claimed that the machines would be banned in the area soon

I don't know if this was true, but I still find it surprising. I've used the machines for years.

Some rather interesting challenged ballots from the Minnesota Senate race.

Clearly one or two of those were people yanking the Board of Election's chain, but other people are apparently just stupid.

That's brilliant. Lizard People FTW!