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One thing people here often overlookOne thing people here often overlookPosted Sep 1, 2004 14:00 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)In reply to: Back door in Diebold voting systems? by petegn Parent article: Back door in Diebold voting systems?
YOU can't verify, ever, whom do you voted for, because if you could, your boss could do it too. Period. Any, and I mean any, way to produce a document/output saying "your vote was for Bob", is a way to permit mass coercion of workforce during elections.
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One thing people here often overlook Posted Sep 1, 2004 14:17 UTC (Wed) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link] I don't think anybody is overlooking that at all. The key needs are to (1) verify that a person has voted (not how that person voted), (2) make the voting process easy to understand and operate for the individual voter, and (3) generate reliable vote counts.
The post you replied to was addresssing #1. A recent news story indicated that perhaps 10's of thousands of voters are registered to vote in both New York and Florida (the vast majority of them Democrats, for those of you who are keeping score). A reliable, national-scope "exit verification" system could completely eliminate this particular form of fraud (voting more than once in Federal elections, which is a felony).
Peter Yellman
One thing people here often overlook Posted Sep 1, 2004 17:57 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Nothing to see here. When I moved from Maryland to California, I did not contact the state of Maryland and tell them to take my name off the rolls, and neither does anyone else. The result is that lots of people are at least temporarily registered to vote in two states. The vast majority of the people who are on the rolls in both New York and Florida are almost certainly elderly retirees who moved from NY to Florida. They aren't very likely to vote in Florida, hop a plane, and vote again the same day in New York; after all, while the Florida race is very close, NY is firm for Kerry so it doesn't matter. However, I'd be interested in where you saw this article, and whether it was Republican-affiliated media (Fox, NY Post, Washington Times, Orlando Sentinel, etc). Florida Republicans are always looking for any angle to stop Democrats from voting. If only they can toss all those seniors who just moved down from NYC off the ballot, they can assure a Bush victory. It was the bogus felon list, more than the hanging chads, that gave the state to Bush last time.
One thing people here often overlook Posted Sep 1, 2004 16:01 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Wrong. If the document never leaves the voting booth, there is no way for your boss to know how you have voted.
One thing people here often overlook Posted Sep 1, 2004 17:05 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] If the document never leaves the booth, you can't be sure your vote will be counted. If it leaves the booth, then you could campaign "everybody that voted for X drops his receipt in a box please, so we can match the counts".
Imagine the following excercise: me and you are running for class prez. In the final sum, I have 20 votes, and you have 30 votes; but my 35 friends all come to me and say "we voted for you, here is our receipts".
OTOH, if I was the bully, I could say to all my 45 bullied, show me your receipts NOW or I'll bust you kneecaps.
Now, without the receipts coming out of the booth, and back to the first case, my 35 friends can scream all they want and I don't have any evidence of foul play. Suppose the principal exchanged 15 votes for me by 15 pre-printed votes for you. Ta-da... no one will know. If I ask for a recount, all we have is 20 for me and 35 for you EVEN IF IT's a fraud.
Now, the beauty of a good system is the following: if three different people appointed by the principal, plus two of my friends and two of your friends are looking the ballot boxes at all times, making certain the results are not tampered, summing the results independently, THEN you can be reasonably sure no votes were swinged.
Got my point?
One thing people here often overlook Posted Sep 1, 2004 16:35 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] In the old (and still widely used, worldwide) paper ballot system of marking an "X" beside your candidate, you certainly *can* verify whom you voted for. You can even watch as the poll worker takes the folded ballot and puts it in the ballot box. So far, so good (unless the poll worker is extremely skilled at sleight of hand, which is statistically unlikely).
True, after that you have to rely on the ballot counters to do their job honestly, and the observers to keep them so -- but in general since multiple parties have representitives involved and observing, odds are pretty good that your vote will be counted as cast.
(Of course there's still room for hanky panky -- bogus voter registration, bussing in of "voters" from other areas, "lost" ballot boxes, hanging chads... (oh, wait, no hanging chads with a marked "X" system) -- but a recount of your vote will still count it as for whom you cast it.)
Of course the electronic media don't like it because they can't give their breathless instant anlyses and before-the-poll-closes announcements of the "winner" (as happened in Florida because the panhandle is in a different timezone than the rest of Florida), but so what?
One thing people here often overlook Posted Sep 1, 2004 18:12 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] My point is exactly that no, you have to trust a lot of people. In the case of a recount, you have to trust the place where the votes were stored. You have to trust the seals in the ballot boxes, before and after the first counting. You have to trust people who transport ballot boxes. You have to trust the maker of the seals not to make seals in excess.
The snafu of the last USofA presidential elections was mainly due to the following factors:
* lack of accountability. each wrongly counted vote should be laid havily on someone's back: the election fraud that took place was a perfect crime.
* lack of a national voter database. this has privacy issues, ok. but a lot of countries (including mine) do well with national ids. get over it.
* absentee voting. here this is absolutely forbidden. either you vote where you registered or not. period. it gives a lot of space for fraud.
* bipartidarism. for any ballot box here, there are 40-50 people looking at it until the moment the sum (electronic or not) comes out of it. this is because for any ballot box, there are at least five to ten political parties involved.
* bad electronic media. our media outlets (electronic or paper) discovered they had a lot of power when they could immediately count, add, and accompany the results of the election.
* nonsense timezone managemnt. I don't recall if there are 4 or 5 timezones in the US. in Brasil, there are four -- and all the voting booths open at the same time: the hour of opening is adjusted in each timezone so all things start and end at the same time.
* fear of economic uncertainty. NYSE drops a few points, even Gore gave up: ok, Bush takes it all. I don't care.
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