Weekly Edition
Return to the Announcements pageSponsored link
Vyatta –
Linux & Open Source
Alternative to Cisco –
Advanced Routing,
Firewall, VPN, QoS..
Free Download ->
| |||||||||||||
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment
Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release For Immediate Release: Thursday, December 08, 2005 Contact: Matt Zimmerman Staff Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation mattz@eff.org +1 415 436-9333 x127 North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment EFF Asks Court to Void Approval of Diebold and Others Without Source Code Review Raleigh, North Carolina - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Thursday filed a complaint against the North Carolina Board of Elections and the North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services on behalf of voting integrity advocate Joyce McCloy, asking that the Superior Court void the recent illegal certification of three electronic voting systems. North Carolina law requires the Board of Elections to rigorously review all voting system code "prior to certification." Ignoring this requirement, the Board of Elections on December 1st certified voting systems offered by Diebold Election Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Election Systems and Software without having first obtained – let alone reviewed – the system code. "This is about the rule of law," said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "The Board of Elections has simply ignored its mandatory obligations under North Carolina election law. This statute was enacted to require election officials to investigate the quality and security of voting systems before approval, and only approve those that are safe and secure. By certifying without a full review of all relevant code, the Board of Elections has now opened the door for North Carolina counties to purchase untested and potentially insecure voting equipment." North Carolina experienced one of the most serious malfunctions of e-voting systems in the 2004 presidential election when over 4,500 ballots were lost in a voting system provided by e-voting vendor UniLect Corp. Electronic voting systems across the country have come under fire during the past several years as unexplained malfunctions combined with efforts by vendors to protect their proprietary systems from meaningful review have left voters with serious questions about the integrity of the voting process. "North Carolina voters deserve to have their election laws enforced," said co-counsel Don Beskind of the Raleigh law firm of Twiggs, Beskind, Strickland & Rabenau, P.A. "Election transparency is a requirement, not an option. The General Assembly passed this law unanimously, and it is now time for the Board of Elections to meet their obligations." On behalf of McCloy, EFF and Beskind intervened in – and convinced a judge to dismiss – a separate lawsuit filed last month by Diebold, which sought to be exempted from the state's transparency laws. Diebold represented to the court that it would be "unable" to comply with the code escrow requirement of the statute. Inexplicably, the Board of Elections certified Diebold despite it's admitted inability to comply with the law. A hearing in McCloy's case against the Board of Elections is set for Wednesday, December 14. EFF and Beskind have asked the Court for a temporary restraining order preventing North Carolina's 100 counties from purchasing any of the recently certified systems unless and until the Board of Elections complies with its statutory obligations. For the full complaint: http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/EFF_Mandamus_Complai... For this release: http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_12.php#004237 About EFF The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/ -end- _______________________________________________ presslist mailing list https://falcon.eff.org/mailman/listinfo/presslist (Log in to post comments)
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 9, 2005 21:51 UTC (Fri) by azhrei_fje (guest, #26148) [Link] And I thought I read in a dead-tree article within the last couple weeks that Diebold already had complied with a similar California requirement to put the source code into escrow. Why not NC?
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 10, 2005 15:21 UTC (Sat) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link] The only reason to use electronic voting is to predict the outcome before the election, it only mollifies the ignorant into believing there are still fair elections.
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 10, 2005 22:34 UTC (Sat) by rmstar (guest, #3672) [Link] That is a little paranoid, i would say. A properly audited and monitoredelectronic voting system should be very accurate, fair, and transparent.
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 11, 2005 4:09 UTC (Sun) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link] << That is a little paranoid, i would say. >>
I wouldn't. Especially since there is a possibility that this company was part of significant election fraud in the ohio elections. Disregarding whether or not this is true or false, the possibility that it could be true without anyone being able to prove it demonstrates conclusively that the idea of having electronic voting without having direct access to the source code is completely insane if you care about living in a democracy. Some of us don't, some of us do.
Obviously, this software should not have been developed by a commercial entity, it should have been open source, developed by some consortium of computer science professionals, academics would seem the most obvious.
If you trust your country's future to this type of non-transparent, non publically run, technology you are opening the door to a very unpleasant future, some of which we are already priviged to be witnessing today.
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 11, 2005 9:13 UTC (Sun) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link] he didn't say that the current system and the way it's being deployed is fair or acceptable, he was responding to the idea expressed above that there is NO way for an electronic voteing sytem to be anything other then a way to cheat the election.
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 11, 2005 23:13 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] And I think he had a point. Complex voting systems only benefit the establishment; as nettings expresses below much better than I can, a simple voting system should be a basic requirement since it is the basis of accountability and reliability. It's not easy to see how an electronic voting system can be made simple.
Simple electronic voting Posted Dec 12, 2005 7:46 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] You could start by *trying*.http://www.slate.com/id/2107388/ This system is far from ideal (no paper trail!) but it *is* simple.
Simple electronic voting Posted Dec 12, 2005 13:36 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] The devices mentioned in the article linked contain a microprocessor. Can you assure it is functioning correctly? With paper ballots anyone can verify how the system works, plus it leaves an audit trail; with these devices you have to trust the chip manufacturer. Where are the results tallied? This is not what I would call "simple".
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 12, 2005 13:16 UTC (Mon) by carcassonne (guest, #31569) [Link] It's not easy to see how an electronic voting system can be made simple.Well, you could start by taking a look at the source code of the Australian Capital Territory voting system: Electronic voting and counting It was used in 2001 and 2004. Don't ask me if it was successful or what, I only noticed the page very recently. Lots of details are provided on the site, check it out. If anyone has comments about that system, please share.
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 11, 2005 9:17 UTC (Sun) by andyh (guest, #26163) [Link] How do we know that the source code provided by the vendor or the open source project actually matches the code in the machines the state uses? The vendor may well provide binaries that don't match the source code. If the software is open source, the government could easily patch the code to favor the incumbent.
E-voting is a problem of trust. The systems only differ in who the voter is expected to trust. Do you trust an independant company or the government to accurately record votes?
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 11, 2005 10:16 UTC (Sun) by rmstar (guest, #3672) [Link] E-voting is a problem of trust. The systems only differ in who the voter is expected to trust. Do you trust an independant company or the government to accurately record votes?I think governments, companies, citizens, etc. are entitled to a modicum of a-priori trust. If this is not aplicable, then it really doesn't matter that much who wins an election because your society is rotten and not going anywhere nice anyway. E-voting has the (potential!) advantage that the number of points of failure are limited, as opposed to hand-counting. Bright, trusted people can (in theory) check the system for failure, and lots of other people can make sure that this is actually the system that is deployed (using seals etc.). Yes, a determined, evil government can use them to fake elections, but frankly, you don't need computers for that. Hopefully the EFF is successfull in making sure that these machines are properly audited and work as intended.
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 12, 2005 13:08 UTC (Mon) by carcassonne (guest, #31569) [Link] How do we know that the source code provided by the vendor or the open source project actually matches the code in the machines the state uses? The vendor may well provide binaries that don't match the source code. If the software is open source, the government could easily patch the code to favor the incumbent.Sources should be built at an official, neutral and approuved by all location. The resulting binaries checksumed and shipped back to the vendor. Then it is the responsability of the vendor to use those binaries. if found at fault, sanctions will be used. Aw, forget that, the vendor won't like it. And maybe the developers won't either. Or at least those that always seems to have last-minute fixes to throw in.
e-voting is problematic regardless of code trustworthiness Posted Dec 11, 2005 11:01 UTC (Sun) by nettings (subscriber, #429) [Link] e-voting with closed source systems is criminally insane, there's no need to argue about it.
but even an open-source, free software voting infrastructure is not a perfect solution.
paper trails are a very good start to reconcile counting speed and efficiency with the voter's right to understand the process, but the entire issue of trust for non-technically-trained people needs to be discussed more.
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 12, 2005 9:39 UTC (Mon) by tetts (guest, #254) [Link] As a UK resident who used to be politically involved, and spent one evening watching a count, I don't understand the need for electronic counting. In the UK votes are crosses on a ballot paper which are counted by hand. This seems to work quite well, does not appear to be very expensive and is easily traceable. i.e. I as an observer would watch the tellers move ballots into the right pile. If they got it wrong I was supposed to tell them. Polls would close at 10pm on general election night and most seats would be declared between 2-4 am. A single counting centre would have 5-6 constiuencies so would be counting 200,000 votes or so. If a vote was close (with one or two hundred) then there would be a recount.
One thing that seems to be driving a move to e-voting, in the UK, is a desire to make it easier for people to vote. I don't quite understand this. I've never found it very difficult to spend 10-15 minutes popping into the polling station to vote. I suspect it is a generational thing. Despite working with computers all my adult life (20 years or so) I don't think that a text message vote or phone vote is a great thing. The current generation of of politicians think that young people will only vote through such means.
Simon
Paper votes Posted Dec 12, 2005 14:24 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Same here in Spain. The system has always worked, recounts are simple and fast, and there is no need for electronic fireworks at all.From what I saw of eDemocracy at a previous job, electronic machines if anything turn people down. Biggest European success story so far was some 2000 participants in a large scale test for the city of Hamburg, of which only about 1000 had sent more than a message. In a Barcelona trial at about the same time, only 50 or 100 people showed up. US people, if you want simpler election processes, simplify your election processes. There are no shortcuts; machines will not help you there.
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 12, 2005 17:44 UTC (Mon) by pdundas (subscriber, #15203) [Link] As a UK resident, I have to say that the most likely explanation for falling voter turnout isn't the difficulty of voting, or even increased voter laziness, so much as an increase in voter cynicism about the political process. This is caused by things like:
- more personality-based campaigning, where policies are downplayed and individual politicians are attacked. The mud adheres, and cynicism about all parties increases.
- news media which pander to this infantile process, and which prefer hunting political scalps to covering political issues or policies.
- main parties with barely distinguishable policies, or unclear policies, or both.
- refusal by ministers to resign when they are caught lying to parliament (for example Mr Byers, who was only disposed of for some other reason). Oddly enough, this makes voters think that politicians are likely to be lying.
- politicians who persue pet projects rather than dealing with issues that people are actually concerned about.
- politicians who create expensive projects and give the contracts to their mates, or join the boards of companies as soon as they are out of office (if not sooner). eVoting companies may come into this category.
- politicians who even their own families can't trust.
I suspect some of these issues may hold in the USA as well.
Simpler voting (including e-voting) might be nice, and the technology is interesting. But if it's supposed to increase turnout, we're solving the wrong problem.
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 12, 2005 20:04 UTC (Mon) by whalesong (guest, #25797) [Link] AMEN to that!
(from germany)
EFF: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment Posted Dec 12, 2005 19:26 UTC (Mon) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link] The issue is not electronic vs. mechanical voting. The issue is having a robust failsafe system *and* audit system that can't be wholesale compromised at a few chokepoints. We obviously wouldn't trust a paper ballot system that depended on the current governor's cousin's company to drive around and collect them all before they got counted. Diebold has already shown themselves to be a form of high tech corrupt govern's cousin company and they have the ability to compromise the elections they are involved in at many chokepoints, whether willfully or through sheer incompetence.
|
|||||||||||||